Lori Eshleman's Blog, page 7

Review of Rare Objects, by Kathleen Tessaro

Rare Objects by Kathleen Tessaro

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


The novel Rare Objects, by Kathleen Tessaro, gives us a portrait of an Irish working class girl from Boston’s North End, who has beauty, brains, and an unfortunate predilection for liquor and the wrong sort of men. Yet, in the midst of the Great Depression of the 1930’s, Maeve Fanning (who goes by May) is lucky enough to find a job at an antique dealer’s shop, where she finds herself surrounded by old and rare objects. Possessed of a love of reading and a quick mind, May quickly becomes an asset to the business, especially since she happens to know the daughter of one of Boston’s wealthiest families, Diana Van der Laar. May and Diana become fast friends despite Diana’s mysterious moods and family secrets--and despite May’s own love of alcohol in an era of speakeasies. Tessaro dwells lovingly on both the Italian atmosphere of the North End and on the art objects in the antique shop and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Pulled between these two extremes, I was reminded variously of Theodore Dreiser and Henry James.

Narrating in the first person, at times May seems too articulate and too sophisticated in her knowledge of art for someone of her background. Yet the focus on the meaning of objects gives the novel depth. Beyond simply creating a luxurious backdrop, the author offers a philosophy of “things” that runs throughout the book like veins in an agate. For example, the antique dealer, Mr. Kessler, says of collecting: “At its root is an ancient belief, a hope, in the magic of objects. No matter how sophisticated we think we are, we still search for alchemy.” (72) May does indeed seem to be searching for alchemy, first through alcohol, then through the aegis of two mysterious men: Diana’s wealthy brother, James Van der Laar; and Mr. Kessler’s business partner, the British archaeologist Mr. Winshaw. James offers May a seductive glimpse of the high life, playing on her desire for gifts, drink and attention. Mr. Winshaw is mysterious largely because he is off traveling and searching for “rare objects”; and when he does appear, he seems critical of May, which naturally piques her interest.

May’s drinking problem is handled as a moral issue that could tip her life into ruin, depending on how she deals with it. The author hints at reasons behind her drinking, including uncertain parentage and an unhappy love affair; but mostly we are given the sense that May is a decent girl who has lost her way and needs to find her path. In the end we learn perhaps the rarest object is that thing or person which has been repaired, symbolized by May’s broken teacup which Mr. Winshaw mends with gold.




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Review of Exposure, by Helen Dunmore

Exposure by Helen Dunmore

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


The novel Exposure, by British writer Helen Dunmore, is both a Cold-War thriller and a social novel that explores the middle class lives of a husband and wife and their three children living in post-war London. Lily is a Jewish immigrant who escaped Nazi Germany, while Simon, her husband, is a low-level government functionary whose ordinary life masks a secret past. Their lives are turned upside down by a phone call from Simon’s colleague Giles, who has broken his leg and left a top-secret document in a place it is not supposed to be. This phone call causes Simon and Lily’s lives to unravel. Simon ends up in prison, while Lily flees with her children to a remote cottage by the sea in Kent. A refuge less safe than it seems. Dunmore is a master of the small details and atmosphere of daily life: a cup of tea on a rainy day, an apple tart baking in the oven, a childhood game after dark in a rear garden. She draws us into the minds of her characters: their secret fears, their sense of having achieved something good in life and yet their awareness that there could be something different, or something more. For Giles, whose poor health and drinking have left him a shadow of who he once was, Simon is a shining memory from the past. For Simon, Giles represents a part of himself that he has kept discretely buried. Buried secrets, buried identities, buried documents. All risk exposure and bring danger, whether physical or emotional. Dunmore flips back and forth between the characters, building suspense and tension. Through most of the book, I found myself wondering what would happen next--and what happened next was immensely satisfying.



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Review of Cicada, by Moira McKinnon

Cicada by Moira McKinnon

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


In her novel Cicada, Moira McKinnon takes us on a nonstop adventure in the Australian outback of the early 20th century. Emily Lidscombe, an upper-class Englishwoman, is forced to flee for her life from the ranch where she lives with her husband William, accompanied only by her Aboriginal maid Wirritjil. The fact that the two are able to survive this challenging landscape is due only to Wirritjil’s skills at hunting and gathering, and her knowledge of the Dreamtime stories and mythic beings of her people. The novel is lush with descriptions of the plants, birds, animals, rocks and rivers of Australia. Wirritjil and Emily, at first uneasy as mistress and servant, develop an intimate bond, as Emily learns to listen to the birds, find hidden water, and even paint herself in traditional body-paint. They often struggle to communicate, as Wirritjil speaks in a broken dialect, a blend of English and Aboriginal; and the two hold vastly different perspectives on place, time, race, and class. The reader, too, shares this sense of struggle, faced with not only difficult dialect, but many Aboriginal words.

Along with a vivid picture of the rugged and wonderful outback, Cicada also evokes the racism and injustice perpetrated on the Aboriginal people by English colonists. The latter half of the novel takes the reader to rough cattle towns, prisons, and a court of law where justice is arbitrarily meted out. Here Emily finds herself as much of an outcast as Wirritjil, no longer fitting her accustomed position and status. By the novel’s end her English perspective on place and time has shifted, as she comes to realize that there is “No yesterday or tomorrow. There was only this moment” (344). While I might have liked more development of the characters’ back-story--particularly of Emily’s forbidden relationship with a half-Aboriginal ranchman, which is told in flashbacks--by the end I found myself moved and amazed. This is a novel to remember.




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Review of The Moor's Account, by Laila Lalami

The Moor's Account by Laila Lalami

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


A historical novel and a fine work of literature, The Moor’s Account recreates the failed Narváez expedition to Florida in the early 16th century from the point of view of the Moroccan slave Mustafa al-Zamori, called Estebanico by the Spanish. Narrated in the first person, the novel alternates between Estebanico’s earlier life--first as the son of a notary, then as a trader, and finally as a slave in Spain--and the expedition, in which some three hundred men are gradually whittled down to a handful, by disease, accident, and encounters with Indians. It is an adventure story, a kind of Lord of the Flies evocation of what happens to “civilized” men when they are lost in a wilderness that does not play by their rules or laws. Gradually they shed their Spanish clothing, their horses, their weapons, and even their language, until they become almost indistinguishable from the Indian groups with whom they are forced to live in order to survive. Estebanico, with his knowledge of Moorish medicine and of trade, is particularly skillful at adapting. He observes the encounter between Indians and Spanish with an outsider’s eye, who himself feels near-invisible. While to the Spanish he is an illiterate Christian convert, in his self-identity he is a literate Muslim with rich memories of the past. At times, when he dares to speak up or act, he unwittingly re-directs the expedition; for example, when he finds a gold pebble in an Indian village, which leads to a fruitless hunt for riches; or when he spots a shard of Spanish glass, which turns the small band toward New Spain and the recently conquered Aztec empire of Tenochtitlan.

The back and forth narrative, told in the form of stories about different locations such as “The Story of the Island of Misfortune,” helps maintain suspense and interest. It also gives the novel the structure of an older mode of story-telling that is credible for the 16th century. Through Estebanico’s eyes, Lalami captures the sights, sounds, and smells of the exotic landscape in prose that is measured and evocative. Her narrator also takes note of the character and personality of the expedition leaders, including his owner Dorantes and the expedition treasurer Cabeza de Vaca, who in 1542 wrote a narrative of the expedition. In the course of this grueling ordeal, social differences and rank begin to dissolve, and hidalgo and slave become equal. But the question remains: once the survivors return to Spanish territory will these distinctions re-emerge? Will Estebanico win his freedom? And will treatment of the indigenous population of the Americas change? This novel offers the reader a new perspective on the Spanish exploration of North America, as well as a moving portrait of what it means to be a slave.




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Review of Flame Tree Road, by Shona Patel

Flame Tree Road by Shona Patel

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Shona Patel’s second novel offers a view of late 19th to early 20th century British Colonial India through the eyes of a brilliant young man of humble birth who makes good due to the vision of his educated father and the patronage of British officials. Biren Roy grows up in a river village in Bengal, where his father works in a jute mill for a British company and tutors his sons in his spare time. Tragedy and good fortune propel Biren to success as a student at Cambridge and then a lawyer in India. Along the way, he never loses his goal of improving the condition of women in India, a goal shaped in part by his father’s enlightened attitudes and his own sympathy for his mother, his wife, and an outcast widow who lives by a temple. While his motives are noble, at times his attitudes seem too modern for his era. Like a duck who sheds water, Biren seems surprisingly free from the biases of the 19th century, whether those of India or of England. The novel also offers a relatively uncomplicated view of British Colonialism: as if British laws, education, and justice have come to rescue India from the murk of superstition. As Biren states, “But remember the mighty power of the British rule can be used for our good, as well” (370). The British characters are portrayed as avuncular patrons, albeit class-conscious, profit-driven, and unpredictable.

As its title might suggest, Flame Tree Road is studded with love stories: between his mother and father, Biren and his wife, as well as with an upper class English woman. This personal story takes the lead, while Biren’s reforms and advocacy for Indian women remain in the background. India itself is described in rich detail for its interesting foods, colorful clothing, exotic rituals, and crafts such as pottery-making and weaving. Patel is at her best when the story veers into tragedy--it is then that the characters’ emotions and the complexity of Indian society come to life. There are also some nice scenes of friendship and intimacy, such as when Biren’s mother Shibani has her hair oiled and washed by her neighbor. Or when Biren finds in his wife’s trunk half of a lost Russian nesting doll he had given his daughter, a discovery that triggers both hope and grief. Symbols like this one-- prophecies, flame trees, cobras and even a broken umbrella--help heighten suspense and unify the story in a book that covers almost a century. Despite the successes in his life, which come in part from British education and patronage, Biren eventually pays a price for his difference from his own society. Near the end of the book, a holy man’s prophecy comes fatefully true, leaving the reader to wonder which is more powerful: reason or superstition.




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Review of All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Set in France and Germany during World War II, Anthony Doerr’s new novel alternates rhythmically between two main characters, a German boy Werner and a French girl Marie-Laure. Each has both handicaps and extraordinary abilities. Werner is an orphan who is a wunderkind with radios and therefore ends up in a German technical unit that tracks resistance radio transmissions. Marie-Laure is blind and yet able to track her way around Paris and Saint-Malo with the aid of scale models built by her doting father. Like Werner, she has a scientific fascination--with shells of all kinds. Werner’s friend Frederick, in turn, is a bird-enthusiast. And Marie-Laure’s father is a master of locks and 3-d puzzles. Finally, a German officer in charge of gathering art treasures for the Third Reich has his own fixation on a particularly large and legendary diamond that involves all of the characters in one way or another. Scientific preoccupations run through this novel, and are, without doubt, a fascination of the author. The novel itself becomes a kind of cabinet of curiosities. This sense is heightened by the author’s habit of making repeated lists: for example, “He oils latches, repairs cabinets, polishes escutcheons. He leads her down hallway after hallway into gallery after gallery…There are carpenters’ shops, taxidermists’ studios, acres of shelves and specimen drawers, whole museums within the museum” (29). The lists give both a sense of repetition and order to the prose, and a sense of depersonalization. In his most poetic passages, Doerr makes a metaphoric leap from science and technology to philosophy, as when he compares the swirling paths of electromagnetic waves to the motions of souls: “And is it so hard to believe that souls might also travel those paths?...That great shuttles of souls might fly about, faded but audible if you listen closely enough?” (529) It is these poetic moments, reflecting on the flux and transience of life, that make the novel moving. As if each stone, each blade of grass, each word, each individual life is part of a great mystery unfolding over eons of time. If there is anything flawed in this gem of a novel, it is the way the very short chapters toss the reader back and forth from one character and setting to another, continually breaking the flow of the narrative and making the reader re-adjust their mental lens. This bipolarity eases toward the end, as the stories of the two main characters merge in a climactic finale.



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Review of The Return of the King, by J.R.R. Tolkien

The Return of the King by J.R.R. Tolkien

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I’ve finished my reread of The Lord of the Rings! Yes, we has! (in Gollum-speak) The highlight has to be Frodo and Sam climbing Mt. Doom, and then the apocalyptic explosion when the deed is done. (If you haven’t read it or seen the movie, I won’t tell you what that deed is.) Their trek through the sere wilderness around the mountain fills one with thirst and dread. While this third part of the trilogy is deadly serious--as it needs to be--Tolkien still manages to provide comic relief in the form of Orcs. As it turns out, Orcs sound like country yokels when one gets to hear them speak. Their minds are not turned toward the higher things (just saying). In fact, they have a propensity to self-destruct, rather like Looney Tunes characters.

The third part also gives a portrait of one of the few female characters, Eowyn, the shield-maiden who goes to war in the garb of a man, like Brunhilde or the Old Norse valkyries of legend. But Tolkien makes clear that she is out of her element in this male world. In the words of Aragorn, the hero-king, when she is injured in battle, “Alas! For she was pitted against a foe beyond the strength of her mind or body” (848). She is also shown to be out of her depth in her feelings of unrequited love--an emotion that Tolkien portrays almost as a disease, or mental illness. Whatever her flaws, she is the most fully characterized woman in the novel. Aragorn’s true love mainly shows up for the wedding; even the Ent-wives are nowhere to be seen!

Trees and forests, much more than women, play an important role in The Lord of the Rings--and this is no less true in The Return of the King. The area around Mt. Doom is shown to be absent of trees or other growing things, except thorny brambles. The most stunning evidence of destructive industrialization when the Hobbits return home is the loss of the trees; in their place is a great chimney and “a great brick building straddling the stream, which it fouled with a streaming and stinking outflow” (993). Even the “party tree” that launched the novel and the quest is gone. In this, Tolkien’s thinking was prescient, as our precious world drifts ever closer to human-wrought destruction. At the end of the novel, he holds out hope, due to the wonderful elven dust that fertilizes and re-greens the Shire. And, to replace the “party tree,” a miraculous mallorn tree with silver bark and golden flowers from the forests of Lothlorien. Throughout this marvelous work, Tolkien balances destruction with rebirth, despair with hope, and high seriousness with humor. A marvelous work, which is also a work of marvels.




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Review of The Two Towers, J.R.R. Tolkien

The Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkien

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Review of The Two Towers, by J.R.R. Tolkien. As I continue my journey through The Lord of the Rings, I have to say I love the Ents! I have always wondered about the lives of trees, how they stay in one place and grow for as much as five thousand years and are a great comfort to humans. Tolkien answers the question of what trees would be like as sentient beings with the ability to move around. He shows great empathy for trees and forests and for their plight, as civilization hacks away at them with little concern. In the words of the hobbit Pippin, “’One felt as if there was an enormous wall of them, filled up with ages of memory and long, slow, steady thinking…’” (452) At the necessary moment, the trees themselves take action against what threatens them.
At the opposite end of the spectrum is the blasted area around Mordor, “a land defiled, diseased beyond all healing” (617), which resembles the poisonous battle-fields of World War I and II--or the garbage pits of the post-industrial world. I thought of David Alfaro Siqueiros’ 1937 painting, The Echo of a Scream, in which a half-naked child sits on a wasteland of industrial detritus. The faceless marching minions of the Dark Lord also remind me of expressionist paintings of struggle and imperialism from the same period. The terrible pull of the Ring becomes a heavy burden for Frodo, the closer he comes to Mordor. It is both a psychological force and a physical one. The blasted landscape and armies of orcs and wraiths might become too much for the reader, if they were not leavened with moments of surprise such as the appearance of an “Oliphaunt” (elephant), and excursions into more pleasant landscapes, such as the woods of Ithilien. Gollum, repugnant and malevolent, is yet rather touching and funny, with his babyish speech and craving for raw fish--almost as strong as his desire for his Precious, the Ring. Near the end of The Two Towers, Tolkien offers an unusual aside in which he contemplates the nature of tales, their characters, and their audience. Of Gollum, he says through the voice of the hobbit Sam, “I wonder if he thinks he’s the hero or the villain?” (697) And speaking through Frodo, Tolkien says, “You may know what kind of a tale it is, happy-ending or sad-ending, but the people in it don’t know”(696). And that’s part of the pleasure of reading The Lord of the Rings: we may know how the tale ends, but we identify so fully with Frodo and Sam and Pippin that we strongly feel their peril, their loyalty, and the uncertainty of their fate.




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Review of The Fellowship of the Ring, by J.R.R. Tolkien

The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I returned to The Lord of the Rings after first reading it voraciously in college many years ago. It was interesting to read this first part with the knowledge and experience I now have, including the study of Old Norse and Old English texts and Early Medieval art history, which provided some of Tolkien’s sources. Though I am no longer twenty, it’s still a great read! I am struck by the sense of humor that crops up here and there, especially when it comes to the hobbits, who have a predilection for drinking songs and dancing on tables. The humor leavens the sense of sadness, loss, and nostalgia for a past golden age, when beings like elves lived in harmony with nature and each other. Tolkien’s reverent descriptions of landscape, woods, waterways, and the night sky also relieve the tension of being tracked by maleficent creatures such as orcs, ringwraiths and balrogs. Were the author alive today, I believe he would be an ardent advocate for natural preservation and sustainability. In early medieval mode, he is also a big advocate for loyalty and commitment to one’s “fellowship,” no matter how different they are. And they are indeed different: several hobbits, a wizard, an elf, a dwarf, and two men. I think Tolkien would fit right in with today’s multicultural world. Finally, Tolkien’s work is surprisingly psychological, addressing the battles within and the difficulty of self-control: the greed for power over others, represented by the One Ring--versus the dedication to peace and respect, not only toward other beings and creatures, but toward the earth itself. Tolkien still speaks in a clear voice to our contemporary world.



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Review of On Fairy-stories, by J.R.R. Tolkien

Tolkien on Fairy-stories by J.R.R. Tolkien

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I read J.R.R. Tolkien’s essay “On Fairy-stories” in preparation for teaching a class on Tolkien. Originally written as a lecture in 1939 and first published in 1945, this essay gives a sense for why Tolkien valued fantasy, fairy-story, myth and legend. So, if you’ve ever wondered what was behind Tolkien’s fantasy fiction, this is the essay for you! In it he argues that fairy-stories and fantasy are not just for children--in fact, adults need them more, and get more out of them. He also objects to the notion that fairy-stories are at the bottom rung of evolution from myth to heroic legend to fairy-story. For him, the world of myth and legend and fantasy is a “cauldron” that has been bubbling for centuries, with bits added into the stew over time. He himself draws from this cauldron--and adds to it--in his own fantasy-writing. What does this type of fantasy literature have to offer? His answer is: escape from some of the ugliness and violence of this world; consolation for some of our profoundest desires, such as the desire to communicate with other living creatures, or the desire to escape death; the experience of “eucatastrophe” (“the good catastrophe”)--or “the sudden joyous ‘turn’” of events; and the resultant feelings of joy. And indeed, as I reread The Lord of the Rings, I find myself experiencing some of these very feelings. It is a great wonder to talk with trees and elves. There is a great sadness to mortality--and loss of things past. And, in the face of great threat, there is a sense of the joy of deliverance. Remember, Tolkien lived and wrote through two World Wars, and had a rightful horror of “the ugliness of our works, and of their evil” (On Fairy-stories). His fiction is steeped in the sense of cosmic battle between forces of good and evil, forces of life and forces of destruction. His works, fantasy though they are, confront some of the most profound questions of his generation--and continue to speak to ours.



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