To know me is to know that I am fascinated by the history of Europe in the Middle Ages, I love long-distance walking, I have written a novel about theTo know me is to know that I am fascinated by the history of Europe in the Middle Ages, I love long-distance walking, I have written a novel about the Catholic Church's crusade to rid France of the Cathars, and my bucket list is full of pilgrimages, even though I'm not, nor will ever be, Catholic.
So I couldn't wait to curl up with Timothy Egan's A Pilgrimage to Eternity: From Canterbury to Rome in Search of a Faith, not only because of its setting and subject matter, but the author himself. A personal hero, one my Pacific Northwest compatriots, whose narrative nonfiction ranks among my favorites.
The author takes on the 1,200 mile Via Francigena, a medieval route between Canterbury and Rome, to contemplate the Catholic faith, search for meaning in its history, and come to terms with his own ambivalence. Egan was raised in a large Irish Catholic family in Spokane, home to the Jesuit university, Gonzaga. His mother was a vibrant, selfless, would-be artist who traded her own ambitions to raise a family and be a wife-mother to a taciturn salesman. He is a self-professed skeptic and abandoned his faith in the face of the Catholic church's and God's many failings, “You can see why people shun a supposedly benevolent creator who presided over the slaughter of the Wars of Religion, the African slave trade, the butchery of the Great War, Stalin’s mass executions, genocide in Germany and Uganda and Cambodia.” But Egan is hoping to reconnect with some manner of spirituality. His sister-in-law is dying of cancer, and he's getting to the age when one's mortality begs the question of an afterlife.
A Pilgrimage to Eternity is a humane, funny, gentle and engaging travelogue, a glimpse into the fraught and fascinating history of Catholicism and Christianity which is in many ways the history of Western Europe. Egan pulls no punches when detailing the broken promises and travesties of the Church, either historical or contemporary, including a harrowing episode of a predatory priest in Spokane, but he remains unabashedly admiring of Pope Francis and eagerly hopes for an audience with the pontiff at the end of his journey, using his connections as a journalist to reach out to the Vatican.
It's not clear what inner demons he calmed during his long walk to the seat of the Catholic Church; this books is less about Egan's spiritual journey than his physical and cultural one. It made me long to lace up my boots and strap on my pack, recalling the mind-emptying meditative bliss of my own long foot journeys through Ireland, and the peace I found in walking. I now add the Via Francigena to the long list of pilgrimages throughout Europe I will take in the years to come. Glad to learn the trick about taping heels (and toes- oh, that was so painful to read!).
A lovely travel narrative by one of my favorite non-fiction writers and journalists....more
In postwar Europe, the hunger for justice is keen. The Nuremberg Trials only scratch the surface; hundreds, thousands, of Nazi criminals remain atIn postwar Europe, the hunger for justice is keen. The Nuremberg Trials only scratch the surface; hundreds, thousands, of Nazi criminals remain at large, scattered around the world as they slipped away in the chaotic aftermath.
A former British war correspondent sets about to bring as many of these shadowed monsters to light. He teams up with a rangy, wise-cracking American G.I. and a Russian bomber pilot, who turns out to be his wife. At the top of their most wanted list is The Huntress, a Nazi who trapped and murdered Polish refugees. Even her true identity is a mystery, so trying to find her in the displaced and desperate mass of humanity during those first frantic years after Germany's defeat is a Sisyphean task indeed.
Meanwhile, a young woman comes of age in the Boston suburbs with her father, a widowed owner of an antiques store. When he brings home a beautiful German woman, the first serious relationship he's had since his wife died several years before, Jordan, his teenaged daughter, fights her feelings of jealousy to embrace her father's newfound happiness. But there is something a little off about the perfectly poised Annaliese, a little something Jordan captures one day with her Leica. The camera reveals a cold, vicious expression, caught in a moment of candid surprise. Who is Annaliese, really?
Kate Quinn's premise is fascinating and her research impeccable. The characters are engaging, and the writing is excellent. There is much to love in this multi-layered work of historical fiction. Too much, really. It's overlong and begs great suspension of disbelief from the reader. The coincidences needed to steer the plot in the right direction were frustrating, and I found myself skimming through thick layers of backstory to return to the central narrative. Quinn's great writing and storytelling pushed me to the end, but I wish she and her editors had had some hard conversations....more
This rich, lovely novel offers a breathtaking tour of fin-de-siècle Scotland, France and Russia seen through the myopic eyes of Brodie Moncur, aThis rich, lovely novel offers a breathtaking tour of fin-de-siècle Scotland, France and Russia seen through the myopic eyes of Brodie Moncur, a renowned Scottish piano tuner. His severe short-sightedness serves as a metaphorical reminder that we should hold his perspective at arm's length. Brodie's adventures abroad often become misadventures due to his poor reading of reality.
Brodie is plucked from a dull piano showroom in Edinburgh to lend support at the company's troubled Paris flagship. There he comes up with a scheme to increase sales, and falls into the sphere of a once-celebrated and now slightly demodé Irish pianist, John Kilbarron, and his sinister brother and manager, Malachi. Brodie falls hopelessly in love with Kilbarron's Russian mistress, Lika Blum, an aspiring opera soprano, and becomes a man obsessed.
Lika and Brodie undertake a 'hidden in plain sight' love affair in Paris that blooms into a dangerous liaison when the small entourage moves to St Petersburg. After an old school duel goes tragically wrong (apparently, gentlemen aren't really supposed to fire those pistols), the lovers are forced to flee and go undercover. They are pursued in a cat-and-mouse chase across Europe, and eventually to India, that leaves the reader anxiously turning the pages, hoping the unlikely hero makes it out alive. Add to this Brodie's worsening tuberculosis, and love doesn't only seem blind, it seems doomed.
Love Is Blind is ripe with gorgeous period detail and Boyd makes piano tuning a fascinating avocation, particularly when Brodie uses it for nefarious purposes. He cuts through the melodrama with well-placed moments of humor. The novel is deliciously, compulsively readable-what a treat to relax into the words of a skilled storyteller.
I withhold a star for some of the most horrendously-written sex scenes I've ever read. I can't believe Boyd wasn't even nominated for the 2018 bad sex in fiction award (which gives me some idea of how REALLY bad the others were). And for the ending, which left so many dangling threads, and this reader bereft....more
...beauty in its most completeness is never found in a single body but is something shared instead between more than one body
Ali Smith upends the
...beauty in its most completeness is never found in a single body but is something shared instead between more than one body
Ali Smith upends the standard binary worldview in this gorgeous, complex, postmodern creation. It's a rare book that leaves me weeping at the end, but this is a rare read, indeed. At once playful and melancholic, absurd and achingly real, How To Be Both transcends boundaries of past and present, life and death, perception and reality—not to mention plot and character—to become something greater than the sum of its two distinct, but intertwined, parts.
One part (I cannot say Part One because half the books were printed with one section leading off, half with, well, the other section) brings us the story of George, a teenager living in present-day Cambridge, England. George, named after the iconic 60s pop song Georgy Girl by The Seekers that reduced a young woman to little more than a pretty bauble, is searingly smart and self-aware, yet so vulnerable. She is navigating the murky waters of grief over the sudden loss of her mother, enigmatic and impulsive Carol. Seeking clues into Carol's psyche in a poignant attempt to connect with her mother, to know her and hold her in a way she could not before her mother's death—because we all take the living for granted, don't we?—George tumbles down the rabbit hole of Ali Smith's imagination.
George stumbles upon her mother's obsessions, including Carol's certainty that she was being monitored (or minotaured, in a delightful turn of phrase and twist of plot) by the government, and a work of art by a little-known Renaissance painter, Francescho del Cossa. Along the way, George develops obsessions of her own, including an internet porn video, which she forces herself to watch every day as a way to honor the young girl victimized by the pornography; and a friendship that grows into puppy love with a classmate, Helene Fisker, known as "H". She also gently leads her dumbstruck father and lonely younger brother through their own labyrinth of grief, while waiting for her house to literally fall down around her.
Although George's story is more immediately engaging, because it is told more or less conventionally, with a touching and tender perspective, it is del Cossa's madcap, meandering, stream-of-consciousness life story that anchors the book to its themes: the subversive power of art, the mutability of gender and sexuality, the way existence spills beyond the frames in which we try to contain it, all the madness and joy that is life, particularly life lived within art.
I like very much a foot,” she says, “or a hand, coming over the edge and over the frame into the world beyond the picture, cause a picture is a real thing in the world and this shift is a marker of this reality: and I like a figure to shift into that realm between the picture and the world just like I like a body really to be present under painted clothes where something, a breast, a chest, an elbow, a knee, presses up from beneath and brings life to a fabric.
I have this little notion, delicious to me, that George and H created del Cossa's narrative, or perhaps she, theirs, as she watches from a remove of 500 years. Or that somehow there was this beautiful melding of minds that melted the time and distance between these two stories, a melding that found purchase in a vibrant, revolutionary work of art.
But art and love are a matter of mouths open in cinnabar, of blackness and redness turned to velvet by assiduous grinding, of understanding the colours that benefit from being rubbed softly one into the other : beyond which there's originality itself, which is what practice is really about in the end and already I had a name for originality, undeniable, and to this name I had a responsibility beyond the answering of the needs of any friend.
Wait, what? you say. That makes no sense. Oh, dear reader. Let go of expectations, convention, allow yourself to be dazzled to the point of bafflement. The double helix of this narrative twists endlessly, spinning in possibility and wonder.
hello all the new bones hello all the old hello all the everything to be made and unmade both ...more
I closed the back cover of Tightrope, set the book on the table beside me, and switched on the radio. NPR was just beginning a segment on Russia'sI closed the back cover of Tightrope, set the book on the table beside me, and switched on the radio. NPR was just beginning a segment on Russia's quiet but steady build up of a missile defense system, and its not so quiet military intervention in Syria, its aggression in Crimea. An interview with General Frank Gorenc, commander of the U.S. Air Force in Europe and Africa, revealed the extent to which the United States is wringing its hands over Russia's beefing up of its military. "De-conflicting" is the term the General used. Is that an actual word?
De-confliction (see what I did there?) is what some Cold War spies had in mind when they became double agents, trading secrets on a moral high ground. They reasoned that if enemy countries had equal access to the most terrible things science and engineering could manufacture, a balance of power would be achieved, a peace wrung out of duplicity.
It's fine not to have read Trapeze the prequel to Tightrope, but really, you should. For it is there we first meet Marian Sutro, a young—very young—French-English girl recruited as an English spy during WWII. She parachutes into France at the height of the war and, well, read the novel. It's excellent.
In Tightrope, we meet Marian two years after that moonlit drop into a war zone. She is still quite young in years, but in spirit she is weary, nearly broken by torture and captivity. Tightrope moves at a ponderous pace, mirroring Marian's burden of grief, guilt, and the surreal return to the land of the living. Threading flashbacks and flash-forwards into the narrative, Mawer does a masterful job of adding dimensions of tension to the plot and emotional depth to his characters. There is awkwardness in the perspective interruption of a childhood admirer of Marian's, who steps in to provide background and exposition in odd and cloying segments. I'd rather have been left alone with Marian. But it does not detract significantly from the powerful, tender, graceful and aching character study of Marian Sutro.
The initial turgidity also reflects the dullness of England after the war—the excitement and urgency of the battle is over, replaced by the belt-tightening of life on rations, the chin down, bear-up of cleaning and restoring battered and bombed city streets.
Now that Marian has returned, desperately seeking anonymity, avoiding any claim of heroism, she is bereft of purpose, at times sustained, at times nearly crushed under the weight of wartime memories. She takes an innocuous job at a library, marries a solid former pilot-now-tire-salesman, and fails at settling into a normal life. Haunted by her tortures and deeds, she casts about for a reason to keep on, to look forward instead of behind.
In steps MI6 to fill the void. Marian is re-recruited as a spy. This time the enemy is behind the Iron Curtain and the crisis is one of proportions hard to grasp: total nuclear annihilation.
The cat-and-mouse plot moves forward like a slow-moving river with deadly currents hidden beneath murky waters, but what is most fascinating is the cat-and-mouse game Marian plays with her own soul. In Trapeze she was an ingénue. In Tightrope she is a cool seductress, at ease with slipping in and out of character, down side streets, into the night.
It is fascinating to read historical fiction about the infancy of the Cold War some thirty years after its limping, anti-climactic conclusion, knowing that here we are, still looking askance at Russia with Syria and the Crimea caught between the rocks and hard places of rattling sabers, Putin slapping his bare chest, and the machinations of diplomacy.
Simon Mawer reminds us that behind the engine of intrigue are human beings, motivated by and acting on entirely human impulses. ...more
So recently set adrift by two novels with multiple points-of-view, each chapter taking me through my paces with a new voice, each novel leaving meSo recently set adrift by two novels with multiple points-of-view, each chapter taking me through my paces with a new voice, each novel leaving me parched for emotional resonance as though I were desperate sailor drinking sea water, I thought, 'No, not again," when I embarked upon this voyage with Naomi J. Williams and her debut Landfalls.
Okay, I'll stop with the silly seafaring metaphors.
But I won't stop raving about this unputdownable tour de force, crashingly good, tsunami of a novel.
Williams offers a kaleidoscopic view of the ill-fated Lapérouse expedition of 1785-89, which saw two frigates filled with over two hundred men attempt a circumnavigation of the globe for the glory of science, human endurance, and the maritime prowess of France. With each chapter the kaleidoscope shifts, offering a different perspective—from seaman to scientist, Tlingit child to French castaway. Several of the chapters were published as short stories and in many ways this novel is a collection of individual works, as Williams leaps nimbly from voice, perspective, and style. Yet with each landfall, the threads of characters' lives are woven through the narrative, connecting each part to all those which precede it and the underlying tension of a well-paced thriller holds you fast. The author frames a daring, complicated structure and shores it up, page after page, with a gripping, marvelously inventive, and historically solid story.
The scope of Williams's research is breathtaking yet, like modern masters of the form Mary Doria Russell, Hilary Mantel, David Mitchell, you are drawn naturally, unresistingly into a distant era by flesh-and-blood characters. Heartstrings are pulled in the opening pages and are never released, until the gasping end. There is humor and irony, violence and tragedy, longing and despair. I greedily devoured the pages of a dreamlike obsession with a child bride at a Chilean outpost, gasped at the crystalline and savage beauty of Alaska, burned with anger over sadistic priests on the California coast, mourned love found and lost during the heartbreaking Siberian journey of a translator and his devoted bodyguard. The scope of history and setting, of character and voice and emotion, is nothing short of astonishing.
This is simply the best of what historical fiction can be: a voyage of discovery that speaks to the imagination and the heart, swallowing the reader whole like a literary whale.
For my residency at Anam Cara on Ireland's Beara Peninsula last June, I was assigned the "Novel" room. Painted blue, with blue linens, carpet,For my residency at Anam Cara on Ireland's Beara Peninsula last June, I was assigned the "Novel" room. Painted blue, with blue linens, carpet, curtains, the room was like the inside of a raindrop. A large window above the desk faced west, over looking the bay, and at that time of year, the sun drifted away on clouds of coral sometime after 11:00, headed toward Iceland.
I found Seal Woman on the shelves that lined the Novel room, shelves that groaned under the hundreds of works of fiction, classic and fluffy, familiar and, well, novel. The cover looked just like the view from my window—black rocks reaching from the water and behind them, a velvet-smooth sea stretching toward a setting sun. The story—set in WWII Germany and post-war Iceland—sounded intense and soulful and achingly beautiful, like the scenery around me. I ran out of time before I could read Seal Woman, but returning to the States, I searched until I found a copy, serendipitously signed by the author.
Solveig Eggerz researched the lives of a small group of Germans who traveled to Iceland in the late 1940s as contract laborers for Icelandic farmers. Of the group of 314 men and women, roughly half stayed past their year of service, married and settled into their new communities. Seal Woman is the author's imagining of one of those lives, Charlotte Bernstein, who left Berlin broken by grief over the loss of her husband and only child.
As the story opens, we see a woman looking into the near distance at her middle-age, a silent husband beside her, two boys growing past the boundaries of their farm. The yearning, a voiceless keening, in Charlotte is palpable from the beginning. The story's quiet tension is built on her conflicting feelings of love and despair for her present and her past. There is grace and comfort to be found in the harsh, exhausting landscape where she lives, this lonely corner of a lonely island, yet we wonder how long she will last.
Much of the novel is rendered in flashback to Berlin before and during the war. Of scant means, working as a waitress and attending art school, Charlotte falls in love with Max, a fellow artist and department store heir, and, incidentally to Charlotte, a Jew. They marry, even as brownshirts and stormtroopers goose step like automatons through Berlin and relationships—business, familial, romantic—between Aryans and Jews are declared illegal and punishable by death. Charlotte begs to leave Berlin, their situation made even more precarious with the birth of their daughter, Lena, but Max joins a resistance movement and refuses. They remain, malnourished, terrified, but defiant. The nearly fifteen-year span between Charlotte and Max's courtship and the end of the war tripped me up a bit—years passing in a sentence seemed to diminish the sense of urgency and danger—but Eggerz shows the gradual, then precipitous, descent of Berlin as Hitler gained momentum and the Third Reich rose, smashing its way to power.
By war's end, Charlotte is alone, certain her husband and daughter are dead. But with no bodies to bury, no official notice, there is no closure, only a heavy cloak of grief and guilt, and a dreadful sliver of hope that haunts her dreams. Unable to bear the rubble of her heart that is so like the rubble of a bombed-out city, she leaves for the isolation and supposed peace of a farm in Iceland.
Seal Woman is a work of extraordinary rawness and depth. Eggerz portrays Charlotte's complex psyche with solemn grace, giving us time to develop profound empathy for her as she struggles to knit her past with her present. This is not only a finely rendered work of historical fiction, it is a rich character study, and a portrait of place. Iceland works its way into Charlotte's soul, the land and sea dueling for possession of her—one bracing her like the solid comfort of her new family, the other offering the sweet release of nothingness.
I have something to tell you... Charlotte's mother-in-law encourages Charlotte to release her story, the one she has kept locked inside for nearly twenty years—how she lost her husband and daughter—before she loses herself. In a land of legends, where storytelling is a way to explain a violent and beautiful world, Charlotte at last finds her voice.
When I travel, I gravitate to the small, forgotten places—the crumbling ruins rather than the soaring cathedrals; villages with their backs turned toWhen I travel, I gravitate to the small, forgotten places—the crumbling ruins rather than the soaring cathedrals; villages with their backs turned to the road instead of bustling capital cities. I wonder at the secrets that lie within the stillness, the stories that whisper in the broken stone or behind shuttered windows.
I’d not read Anthony Doerr before All The Light We Cannot See, but as I lost myself in the delicate suite tendresse of this novel, I felt I’d found a kindred spirit. From the grandeur of European cities and the drama of war, he uncovers the gems hidden in quiet, forgotten lives.
As the story unfolded, I wondered if I’d stumbled into another bit of sophisticated YA fiction masquerading as literary novel. The trope of two star-crossed young protagonists—a blind French girl, an orphaned German boy—and the hints of fable and faerie tale woven through the characters’ childhoods, set against the dramatic backdrop of opposing countries on the brink of a war, seemed to tread familiar ground.
But nothing in this shimmering tapestry of a novel is like anything I’ve read before.
The story opens in Saint-Malo on France’s Breton coast—an ancient walled city where the high tides swamp medieval cellars. In August 1944, it’s occupied by German forces and shattered by Allied bombing. Alone in her home sixteen-year-old Marie-Laure LeBlanc catches one of the hundreds of leaflets falling from the sky. It smells of new ink, but no one is around to tell her what it says.
Just a few streets away, Werner Pfenning, a young German soldier, is slowly suffocating in the foundation of a bombed hotel, trying to raise a signal on his radio. Finding voices in the still and empty dark has been his gift since he was a child, trapped in an orphanage in a German coal mining town. At last, he hears the voice of a girl—Marie-Laure—reading passages from Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.
How these two lives come together is the simple, melodic premise of this symphonic novel. Layered into the composition are wonders of science, literature, and music, the horrors of war, poverty, and occupation, and the legend of a priceless blue diamond known as the Sea of Flames.
The light in the novel’s title takes many metaphorical forms. It is the light Marie-Laure’s father, the locksmith at the Museum of Natural History in Paris, shines on the world for his blind daughter. He creates intricate models of their Paris and Saint-Malo neighborhoods, so that Marie-Laure can memorize her world with her fingers and not fear what her eyes cannot see. It is the light her father offers in the lies he writes after he is taken prisoner. It is the light of the people left behind who love and care for a brave, perceptive child. It is the light of the Resistance, a single candle flame of hope and defiance.
The light in Werner’s life is much more dim. His scientific genius is recognized and he is taken from the orphanage—saved from certain death in the coal mines—and sent to a Hitler Youth academy, where hope is extinguished by duty. He becomes a radio operator in service of the Führer, and certain death awaits him in Leningrad or Poland or Berlin. Science and math and the quiet voices transmitting in the dark are his only lights.
The blue flame pulsing from a priceless diamond with a cruel past is another kind of light—one followed by sinister characters who use the trappings of power during the chaos of war to pursue their obsessions to the most bitter ends.
Anthony Doerr’s prose is lovely. It pirouettes with grace on the fine line between lush and lyrical, flirting with magical realism, but never leaving solid ground. The imagination it takes to bring a reader into the head of a blind child learning to navigate her world so that we see, feel, smell, and hear as she does is breathtaking. The ability to evoke empathy without tumbling into sentimentality is admirable. The weaving together of so many scientific and historical details so that the reader is spellbound instead of belabored is nothing short of brilliant.
Structurally, All The Light We Cannot See is bold, its suspense masterful, its prose confident and beautiful. But it is the fragility and strength of Anthony Doerr’s characters that linger longest after the novel’s final pages. Highly recommended; one of this year’s best....more
There is something marvelously cathartic about Us. David Nicholls, graced by both Thalia and Melpomene, succeeds in making a tender salad out of rawThere is something marvelously cathartic about Us. David Nicholls, graced by both Thalia and Melpomene, succeeds in making a tender salad out of raw satire. Humor, whether it’s on the page or the screen, is so hard to do well. When it works, really truly works, we’re wiping away tears of hilarity mingled with tears of sadness. Because what makes us laugh most deeply, what brings on that cathartic release, is comedy and tragedy sharing the stage.
Douglas Petersen is in his early fifties and his wife, Connie, thinks she may want a divorce. She’s not entirely certain, but at any rate, they have a long-planned trip to Europe with their teenaged son to get through, so let’s take the summer and see how things go, shall we? Their son Albie, barely on speaking terms with his father for reasons anyone who has parented a teenager or who has ever been a teenager will understand (namely, that the loathed parent exists), balks at spending several weeks schlepping around the Continent with his parents. He agrees to go only out of adoration for his mother. They are, as Douglas explains, a “small family, somewhat meagre, and I think we each of us feel sometimes that it is a little too small, and each wish there was someone else there to absorb some of the blows.”
Douglas determines that this Grand Tour of Europe is his chance to make his wife fall in love with him all over again and to close the rift with his son.
It is the simplest of premises: how one man tries to save his small but splintered family. It doesn’t even sound all that interesting, really. Oh, but I couldn’t put this down. I didn’t want to put it down. And I laughed and cried all the way through.
I confess I’d never heard of David Nicholls, despite his wildly popular novel One Day (2009) and being a huge fan of the movie Starter for 10, which I learned is a Nicholls’ novel and a screenplay he wrote. I plan to catch up if his other novels are as deeply satisfying as Us.
The story is structured as a series of present moments punctuated by the past, recounted by Douglas, a methodical, staid, and unprepossessing scientist who once devoted his research to the genetic structure of the fruit fly. How he managed to enthrall and hang onto Connie, a blithe spirit, a moody, beautiful artiste, is revealed in self-conscious wonder and tenderness by her still-smitten husband.
It would be easy to feel exasperation and pity for a man whose son regards him with such sullen disdain and whose wife trifles with their twenty-year marriage, but Douglas is never mawkish. Bewildered, yes, but his fumbling determination is endearing and empathetic. And, for heaven’s sake, the unraveling of the trip is just so very funny. Nicholls injects a series of slapstick events into the Petersen’s traipsing through Europe, but the comedy routine is always tinged with Douglas’ own sadness and anticipation: will he save his marriage or not?
The adventure takes on a breathless singularity when Albie, in a fit of pique over an unintended insult by his father, abandons his parents in Amsterdam and disappears with a peripatetic busker from New Zealand. Connie decides the trip is over for her, too, and returns to England. At the eleventh hour, Douglas realizes this is his chance to be a hero to his wife: he decides to stay on in Europe, find his son and make things right. What ensues is a comedy of errors that lands him in jail, in the middle of a school of stinging jellyfish, and in the arms of a sympathetic Scandinavian divorcee. How it all comes together, or falls apart at the end, you really must discover for yourself.
At its heart—and it’s such a very big heart, indeed—Us is the portrait of a marriage, one that will be very familiar to those of us who’ve spent at least half our lives as part of an Us, and perhaps a cautionary tale for those who have not. It is all the taking for granted, the piling up of misdemeanors large and small, the loss of joy in the drudgery of day to day rolled up into a one-sided love story and the coming-of-age of a husband and father. Poignant and hilarious, Us is also hopeful, awkward, darling, and full of joy.
In the Author's Notes, Elizabeth Wein states she set out to write a good story, rather than good history. I love that. I love that she had theIn the Author's Notes, Elizabeth Wein states she set out to write a good story, rather than good history. I love that. I love that she had the confidence to tell the story that was in her heart, in her way, with such panache.
This is a rollicking good tale, with clever, crackling writing, a brilliantly original plot, and irresistible heroines. Its legion of Young Adult fans have every reason to gush. I feel a bit curmudgeonly and contradictory saying that I found the story so implausible, it was hard for me to invest emotionally in the characters, and the painstakingly detailed aviation bits got to be a drag, but still ever so glad to have experienced Wein's sparkling imagination.
Readers who are still keen on reading more about female intelligence agents operating during World War II will be spellbound by Simon Mawer's outstanding (adult) novel, Trapeze: Trapeze by Simon Mawer...more
ETA to add link to segment aired on NPR 1/23/14 on digitized British World War I diaries. See below.
Someone should have warned me. Someone should haveETA to add link to segment aired on NPR 1/23/14 on digitized British World War I diaries. See below.
Someone should have warned me. Someone should have known I am acutely claustrophobic and that opening the door to this book would be inviting in the specter of a panic attack. Picture me curled on the sofa or huddled beneath the covers, my breath shallow, my heart racing, my throat closing as soldiers worm their way through tunnels beneath the trenches. Feel the numbing of my extremities, the draining of blood from my face, the hot rush of acid in my belly, the rise of bile in my throat as those tunnel walls begin to cave and threaten to trap those young men in a tomb made of French dirt. Even now my hands shake with the memory of some of this novel's most horrific scenes. For I couldn't stop reading, I couldn't look away, even through my tears and hyperventilation, I read on.
So, consider yourself warned. This book contains the stuff of nightmares. And it's not just the dreadful tunnels, it is the unrelenting, unfathomable misery of the World War I battlefields. What is it about this war? All war is hideous, but there is something about this war-the number of casualties, the waves and waves of young men released onto the battlefields as cannon fodder, the squalor of the trenches, the chemicals-it was a war that obliterated a generation. Many of those who survived became empty shells, having left their hope and their souls and in some cases, their minds, to the battlefields of the Somme, Passchendaele, Verdun, Ypres.
Birdsong owns the war, it lives and breathes in those trenches. Your skin will crawl with lice, you will feel the slip and muck of blood and brains underneath your boots; hell, you'll feel your toes crumbling with trenchfoot inside your rotting boots. You will cry out in horror as a soldier whose name you've just learned, whose two or three paragraphs will have you aching for his girl and his parents back in Surrey, dissolves in a cloud of flesh and bone beside you. Yes, you have been warned. This is not an easy read.
But Birdsong is more than a black, white, red reel of warfare. It begins as a love story between an odd and doomed French woman, Isabelle Azaire and a very young and impassioned Englishman, Stephen Wraysford. Their adulterous affair in Isabelle's home in Amiens six years before the war opens Birdsong. Part One, the first one hundred-odd pages-is an unsettling combination of tedium and floridity as Stephen and Isabelle tear off their clothes and Edwardian sensibilities under the noses of Isabelle's husband and two stepchildren. The affair ends but their story carries on, surfacing many years later as the war tears into homes, flesh and families. It is Stephen whom we follow throughout the story, he who carries us onto the battlefield, into the trenches and down those dreadful tunnels.
Halfway through the story we jump to 1978, where Elizabeth Benson has taken a sudden interest in her grandfather, Stephen Wraysford and the fate of the men who died in or limped home from the trenches of World War I. Here the narrative stumbles a bit. Elizabeth, now in her late 30s, seems entirely unaware of the horrors of The Great War. This rang utterly false. "No one told me," she says upon seeing the battlefields and monuments of the Somme. I think a British citizen of her generation would have been well aware of the magnitude of that war. But Faulks gives Elizabeth a strong voice and her own personal dilemmas that bring the existential quest for meaning and truth full circle. We don't stay in late 70s London for long, but we dip in and out until the novel's end as Elizabeth's story becomes woven into her grandfather's.
Sebastian Faulk's writing is sumptuous and pitch perfect, capturing the essence of each of the three eras he writes--the tumescent melodrama that unfolds in Amiens in 1910, the desperation, emptiness and incongruous vividness of the war years, and the practical, surging energy and wealth of late 70s London. This is a great novel, an engrossing but devastating read. Just look up every so often and take deep, slow breaths. You'll need them.
If you were to read a simplistic blurb of Simon Mawer's Trapeze - at the height of World War II, a young English-French woman trains as a spy and isIf you were to read a simplistic blurb of Simon Mawer's Trapeze - at the height of World War II, a young English-French woman trains as a spy and is dropped into Occupied France to aid the French Resistance - you might think you hold an espionage-adventure in your hands. Which, in fact, you do! But Mawer isn't after writing a Robert Ludlum thriller. He offers us a subtle, mannered take on a well-worn theme: how war forces the most ordinary amongst us to behave in the most extraordinary ways.
With prose that is distant and spare, Mawer sets the tone of isolation experienced by his young protagonist, Marian Sutro, as she is recruited and trained by the little-known British Special Operations Executive (SOE) and dropped by parachute into Southwestern France. Marian is determined to be of use and to succeed, but her motivations aren't clear. From an upper-middle class family, she has been spared the worst of the war's deprivations and has no family members in combat. Only memories of her teenage crush, a older French man who remains in Paris, tie her to her mother's homeland. She is a restless and intelligent, but hardly strikes one as a tough, street smart spy.
And as it turns out, the SOE's motives are even more shadowy. Of course, all spies are pawns. What makes Trapeze so unique - with its quiet suspense and undercurrent of dread - is how deeply Marian and the reader are drawn into the conspiracy, how inexorably Marian's nature leads her to play precisely the role that has been designed for her. And like most realistic portrayals of war, there are long stretches of lethargy, of waiting, followed by bursts of adrenalin, terror and split-second decisions that a spy's highly-trained body and mind are designed to handle.
The brevity of Marian's training is the only jarring note. Marian spends six weeks on an island off the coast of Scotland and emerges a lethal weapon. She becomes skilled in radio communication, ciphers, firearms, explosives, hand-to-hand combat -- it's a disbelief-suspending transformation from a soft, naive girl into a trained assassin with the survival instincts of a fox and the killer reactions of a tiger. Trapeze is a based on the true story, so perhaps this short training period is accurate. It's hard to imagine, really. But again, Mawer's theme runs through: do any of us really know the depth of our own character - its weakness or its power - until we are faced with desperate times?
I made a comment the other day on Twitter that I felt "character-driven" to be one of the most useless descriptors of literary fiction. To my surprise, my off-hand remark was retweeted numerous times by writers and book fans. Apparently, my words touched nerve.
Had I more than 140 characters to express myself, I would asked: if one says a novel is character-driven, what is the alternative? What well-crafted story isn't character driven? Story IS character, as much as it is plot- it is the behavior, action and reaction of the protagonist and ancillaries within and to their environment. A great story is one that wraps you in the characters' world, whether that world is a disintegrating marriage or an exploding planet of some distant universe. Or the shadowed streets and freezing lofts of Occupied Paris.
What leads me to finally reject the notion of "character-driven" as reductive is Simon Mawer's restrained Trapeze. The author does a superb job of taking fiction's inextricably-linked elements - setting, plot, character, theme - and distilling them into the essence of a perfect story. ...more
Jeepers, what a tough review to write. It's that 3-star curse: "I liked it just fine, thank you, Ma'am." My literary passions were neither inflamedJeepers, what a tough review to write. It's that 3-star curse: "I liked it just fine, thank you, Ma'am." My literary passions were neither inflamed nor offended, but I was happily entertained. And sometimes that's all I need from a read: an escape.
And if it comes in a package of sublimely crafted settings that conjure from history's clouds the darkening heart of 1938-39 Europe, with characters rendered as precisely as wood-block prints ("He was about fifty, Stahl guessed, with the thickening body of a former athlete and a heavy boyish face. He might be cast as a guest at one of Jay Gatsby's parties, scotch in hand, flirting with a debutante.") and a quietly simmering plot, well, Bob's your uncle and I'm your girl.
My hesitation to wax more enthusiastic is that I've been gobsmacked by Alan Furst's novels. The characters smoldered, the plots stole the breath, the thriller in "historical thriller" sent the spine a-tingle. It feels as if Furst approached Mission to Paris with tenderness and affection, both for his beloved City of Lights and for his Cary Grant-inspired leading man, Frederic Stahl. The soft-focus lighting on the characters and setting may have smoothed the sharp edge of tension found in his earlier works.
This is cinema-ready, just like its stars, character actors, and picture-postcard settings. Settle in with a big bowl of buttered popcorn and enjoy the show.
Xavier Bird, a young Ojibwa from the Moose Cree tribe in northern Ontario, returns to Canada from the Europe's Western Front in the summer of 1919. HeXavier Bird, a young Ojibwa from the Moose Cree tribe in northern Ontario, returns to Canada from the Europe's Western Front in the summer of 1919. He is alone, in unimaginable pain from an amputated leg, addicted to morphine, and dying from a spirit broken by the nightmare of war.
Carrying him home in her dugout canoe is his aunt Niska, an elderly medicine woman who has lived on her own in the bush since escaping a Catholic boarding school in her teens. Through a twisting, dreamlike journey of words and images we follow Xavier and Niska on a three-day river trail home. The journey takes us through the years of these characters' lives. To distract Xavier from his pain and to quell her own anxiety over his addiction and the emotional wounds that she cannot heal, Niska recounts her childhood as European settlers closed in on her tribe's ancestral territories. She reveals how she survived and thrived on her own, fell in love with a French trapper, learned to use her healing and divining powers, and how she saved Xavier from subjugation at the hands, whips and rum of the white settlers.
Xavier crossed the Atlantic as a Canadian Army private with his best friend, Elijah Weesageechak ("Whiskeyjack" to non-Cree speakers). Elijah had spent his early years at a Catholic boarding school and is fluent in English, but ignorant of his tribe's hunting, tracking and survival skills. He is reclaimed by the Cree forest and comes of age with Niska and Xavier. Xavier is a patient teacher and Elijah a crack student. By the time the young men arrive in Europe, their marksmanship skills are renowned. They are selected to train with an elite group of snipers. Xavier is soon overshadowed by Elijah's charisma and ego but the two remain a team during their nearly two years on the battlefields of France and Belgium. Why Xavier returns to his homeland alone becomes the thread of tension that reverberates keenly to the final pages.
This is a beautifully written yet brutal novel. Each modern war has its unique horrors. Three Day Road mires the reader in the muck of World War I trench warfare as bodies pile in corners, lice pulse in clothing seams, and toes rot black with trench foot. Boyden spares no detail of hand-to-hand combat, of the blood-lust that becomes the sole means of emotional survival for some soldiers, of the ache for the relief of morphine. The devastation is so relentless, you understand any soldier's break with reason, you feel their uncontrollable rage and their sense of hopelessness as they accept that each moment may be their last.
It is Boyden's storytelling ability and his skills in pacing and tension that keep the gore from overwhelming the narrative. The characters who ripple through bring life and dimension to the battlefields, farmland, forest and hearths of Europe and Canada. This is historical fiction at its finest: a scholar's command of factual detail balanced by a storyteller's heart and passion. Niska provides us with historical context, telling the story of northern First Nations in the early part of the 20th century. Xavier's story is eternal lesson that nothing good comes of war, a lesson we seemed destined to repeat and fail at least once each generation.
I'm glad I waited a few more days to compile my Best Reads of 2011 list. Three Day Road will surely appear in the top ten.
I was beginning to think the title of this book should be "Novel Without End." But Armistice was achieved, the pages ticked away and at long last, asI was beginning to think the title of this book should be "Novel Without End." But Armistice was achieved, the pages ticked away and at long last, as Prohibition took hold and Hitler was jailed, the end finally arrived.
Follett has such an engaging and easy storytelling style; he gives shape to each of his characters-- even the most minor warrant description that puts them firmly in the scene. His settings are rich with detail, his dialogue smooth and believable. It seemed that he left no historical stone unturned in creating this 1000 page epic. We are shown the mines of Wales; the British aristocracy at home in their country estates and at work in London society; Russia as fury at the czar rises to a fever pitch and the soviet is formed; upstate New York in the heydays before Prohibition; Washington D.C. as the U.S. becomes a world power; the WWI battle sites of France and Germany. It is exhaustive. It is exhausting.
I was rolling quickly with the narrative for the first 600 pages or so. Then tedium set in. The battle scenes dragged on; ironically, they did little to capture the true horrors of trench warfare. The passion of Russian Revolution was dulled by too much detail. The huge number of major and minor characters wasn't so much a problem as was losing touch with their relevance. I felt that Follett's ambition became arrogance as the characters' personal lives devolved into soap operatic intrigue.
So, it was exactly what I expected of Follett - richly detailed, but easy-reading historical fiction - and I enjoyed about 60 percent of it. It just seems like another case of a famous writer in need of an editor who won't back down in the face of powerful celebrity.
Aegean harbors shrouded in mist, Parisian cafes crowded with SS and prostitutes, refugees sheltered in Balkan villages: once again Furst conjures upAegean harbors shrouded in mist, Parisian cafes crowded with SS and prostitutes, refugees sheltered in Balkan villages: once again Furst conjures up an elegant, deft, Bogart-and-Bacall tale of WWII intrigue.
It is so easy to let the modern world sink away and the curtains fall open to the soft-focus black and white screen of the Spies of the Balkans. Furst shows his most sentimental side, infusing his hero, police detective Costas Zannis, with tenderness and vulnerability, particularly when it concercens his irresistible sidekick, Melissa. That Melissa is a soulful dog, rather than one of the host of beauties who fall helplessly for Zannis at the raise of an eyebrow, makes her devotion endearing. She was my favorite character and I'm a bit heartbroken, wondering what happened to her after Germany invaded Greece, as of course you know they do in the end. Hope that wasn't a spoiler.
The hard boiled aspects of the plot suffered at the expense of romance. The Berlin to Salonika network that spirited Jews out of Germany before the Gestapo could detain and destroy them came late in the story and played too small a role in the narrative, as did the Gestapo search for Zannis. There was a strange detour into combat that disrupted the spy story tension. And frustratingly, there was only a half-finished sense of what happens inside a small but fierce nation as a cloud of doom- inevitable invasion and war- fills the horizon.
Terribly hard not to enjoy, but I know Furst is capable of tighter writing, fuller characters and breathtaking tension. This was cafe au lait to his usual double espresso. ...more
Rock on, Furst! If anyone can make me keep turning the pages of a book about a Dutch freighter posing as a Spanish tramper, wending its way throughRock on, Furst! If anyone can make me keep turning the pages of a book about a Dutch freighter posing as a Spanish tramper, wending its way through the Mediterranean and Baltic Seas on secret missions, you are the one.
This won't be my favorite of Furst's WWII thrillers, but in the end I was on board for the full ride. He has this amazing ability to slice in and out minor characters that make the mystery come alive with local color- fleshing out details that create vivid scenes.
The tension winds tightly in Capt. DeHaan, who is so very cool; a quiet leader, a born leader. We see the intrigue unfold through his brooding, romantic, solitary and tender eyes. Love and rockets provide humanity and thrills and the ending events unfold breathlessly. ...more
I adored this novel! It contained all the elements of my favorite contemporary fiction: impeccable historical research, geographic locales that are asI adored this novel! It contained all the elements of my favorite contemporary fiction: impeccable historical research, geographic locales that are as strong as the characters, characters who are multi-dimensional & believable, a plot that weaves multiple threads and themes in good pace and with precision. With this, Brooks moves into my favorite authors column. ...more
Hitchcock takes the popular vision of the cheering masses tossing flowers at Jeep-loads of Allied liberators and reflects it back on those liberatedHitchcock takes the popular vision of the cheering masses tossing flowers at Jeep-loads of Allied liberators and reflects it back on those liberated during the year between D-Day in '44 to V-E day in '45 and the months following. The reality of liberation- the indiscriminate bombing and looting of European towns, farms, villages as the American, British and Canadian troops moved eastward and Russian soldiers flooded west- was shocking and heartbreaking. We know well the destruction wrought by retreating German forces, but to read of the wretched behavior of the "Greatest Generation" was devastating, but hardly surprising. The military branches of the Allied forces were woefully ill-prepared and ill-equipped to deal with the millions of starving citizens who remained in their home countries, the millions who survived the camps but remained on the edge of death, the millions of Displaced Persons who no longer had home or family. The soldiers were young men demoralized and amoralized by the sickness of war- that its victims seemed less than human is not acceptable, but it is understandable.
Soldiers were both heroes and wreakers of havoc, survivors greeted liberation with bewilderment and shame, governments thought first of their own political survival in their attempts to rebuild broken nations. This book serves to shatter the romance of World War II and is a necessary reminder that war is wrong wrong wrong. ...more
This was short-listed for the 2005 Man Booker. I'm certain it will be among my top five reads of 2008.
It's the story of a young Irish soldier caughtThis was short-listed for the 2005 Man Booker. I'm certain it will be among my top five reads of 2008.
It's the story of a young Irish soldier caught between the warfields of Belgium and the battle raging at home between the royalists and the nationalists. It's the most graphic and revealing treatment of WWI I've encountered- particularly of trench warfare and the horrors of mustard gas. It amazes me that anyone survived and sickens me how hundreds of thousands of young men were simply led to slaughter by colluding governments.
Despite the grim brutality of the subject, the writing is so lyrical and beautiful, the characters so full of hope and spirit. Portions of it read almost like poetry, yet the language is simple and earthy.
I was frustrated by the glimpses of the 1916 Easter Uprising and the conflict that set Irish against Irish- as if the reader already had a tacit understanding of that history and its nuances. I was confused as to who was on which side (in Ireland)- but then again, that was/is the tragedy of the conflict in Ireland- the division of a country was really the division of villages, friends and families.
But bottom line- it's an incredible book, devastating and beautiful. I cried at the end, even though I knew what was coming. And I cried for the lives that were lost, and for those who continue to be sacrificed in the name of power, greed and moral certainty. War is inexcusable.
A wartime saga that spans the globe and the range of human emotions. You must love sweeping historical fiction to appreciate this and if you do, youA wartime saga that spans the globe and the range of human emotions. You must love sweeping historical fiction to appreciate this and if you do, you will not be disappointed. It is a rich novel with a host of complete, sympathetic characters and period detail that will captivate. ...more
Julie Christine
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