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What are Reading / Reviews - August 2017
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Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
3 ★
Far in the future, the World Controllers have created the ideal society. Through clever use of genetic engineering, brainwashing and recreational sex and drugs, all its members are happy consumers. Bernard Marx seems alone harbouring an ill-defined longing to break free. A visit to one of the few remaining Savage Reservations, where the old, imperfect life still continues, may be the cure for his distress...
Huxley's ingenious fantasy of the future sheds a blazing light on the present and is considered to be his most enduring masterpiece.
My Review
My daughter had to read this for her summer reading (senior year), so I decided to read it as well. I wasn't too impressed. The story line bothered me and parts of the book are hard to follow. I'm still trying to understand why the school system choose this book for high school kids. It centers around a new world order where everyone is born via test tube and they all worship Ford. The concept of parents, birth and exclusive relationships are appalling to them. I found some of the scenes disturbing. John is a "savage" who still lives by the old laws and is trying to fit in. It doesn't work. Although I was not overly thrilled by this novel, I do look forward to reading more by Aldous Huxley. The book did make me think and I like that.
Honoré de Balzac,
Gobseck
[1830] 51 pages [Kindle, in French]The story of the usurer Gobseck; this is one of the subplots of Père Goriot seen from another angle.
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Agatha Raisin and the Potted Gardener – M.C. Beaton – 3***
This series is growing on me, as I get to know Agatha better. She’s a smart woman in business (apparently), but she is woefully bad at relationships. It takes a long time to get to the murder with all the relationship drama, but once Agatha discovers the body, her curiosity keeps her nosing about. All in all a satisfying cozy mystery.
LINK to my review
Nella Larsen,
Passing
(Norton Critical ed.) [1929/Norton ed. 2007] 546 pagesThe second and better known of her two published novels, Larsen's Passing chronicles the relationship of two childhood acquaintances, Irene and Clare, who are both light-skinned Black women. Irene is married to a dark-skinned Black doctor, Brian, has two children, and identifies openly as Black, although she occasionally "passes" to go to an all-white restaurant or event; Clare is permanently "passing" and is married to a white racist, John Bellew, who is unaware of her "true" race. The novel is presented through the viewpoint of Irene, and despite the title is not as much about Clare in my opinion as about Irene.
The novel is set in the same milieu as the Harlem episode in Quicksand; the "elite" "middle-class" professional Black society of the Harlem Renaissance, the milieu that Larsen lived in at the time as a librarian and the wife of a physics professor -- in a way, Passing is an amplification of the critique of that society which she began in the earlier novel. Irene is characterized as someone who is very concerned with "security", with fitting in with the society she is familiar with and fulfilling the standard roles approved of in that group. In Clare's "passing" (and in Gertrude's marriage to a white man who knows she is Black) Larsen brings in other choices available to some Blacks (or mixed race persons) beyond those in the first novel. Irene, although she prides herself as being loyal to her "race", unlike Clare, is determined to imitate the behaviors of the white middle class; while Clare, from a working class background, has by passing and marrying a very rich white man leapfrogged into a higher social group. Ironically, Clare associates with Irene's darker Black servants, which Irene disapproves of, and seeks out the Black culture which Irene has turned her back on. As one critic puts it, Irene is the one who is really "passing" by thinking the way the white middle class does, while Clare is consciously manipulating the white society. Actually, we learn very little definite about Clare, because the Clare we see is mediated through Irene, who is afraid to see Clare in herself. She disapproves of Clare decieving John, but she manipulates Brian and prevents him from living the life he wants to live. It is clear that Irene is a "puritan", or better a "Victorian" -- to choose between two anachronistic labels; even in her relationship to her husband she is repressed, disapproving of passion and sexuality, not as immoral but as vulgar, not respectable. She eventually suspects Clare and Brian of having an affair -- as much of what Irene believes, it is ambiguous whether this is reality or not: Irene projects her fears onto Clare in so many ways, her fear of not being respectable enough, of being "found out" as Black (culturally), of sexuality and so forth.
I read this in a Norton critical edition, which, after the text of the novel (82 pages) has another 460+ pages of additional material. This begins with a section of contemporary reviews of the novel and background articles from the press of that time on passing and miscegenation (including a section on the Rhinelander case, which is mentioned in passing in Passing), then has three very interesting sections of selections from earlier novels and stories (the first section is about "the tragic mulatta", the second about "passing", and the third has literature from the Harlem Renaissance), and ends up with 16 critical articles in chronological order from the 1970s to the time this edition was published. The first reviews of the book were critical of it because they all took it as being the story of Clare and her "passing", in the tradition of the earlier novels included here, and they found the way in which Clare was seen through Irene as getting in the way of the "real" story. The modern articles mostly see the novel as being the story of Irene, with Clare and her "passing" as mainly a "foil" for eliciting Irene's character, which is the way I read the novel as well. However, some of them I think go to far in denying that the novel is about race at all, and seeing it as about class and gender (which in part it is) and about "homoeroticism" (which I don't really see in the text) -- of course it is essentially about race, whatever else it is also about. Usually I avoid critical articles about modern novels (as opposed to older classics where they can fill in background I'm not familiar with) but in this case many of the older criticisms enlarged my understanding of the book. The newer criticisms were jargon-filled postmodernist/feminist/psychoanalytic academic criticism of the type I get nothing from, mainly concerned with locating the book in terms of trendy literary theories rather than the context of the time it was written.
The questions which this book (and her previous novel as well) inspire without pretending to answer (and which were issues discussed in the Harlem Renaissance in general) are still relevant: what, really, is race? Is it something "real" and intrinsic, or is it just a social construction? How does "passing" relate to this? Are mixed race people actually Black, as the theory of hypo-descent (the "one drop" theory) insists, are they a separate "race", or part Black part white, or at some point are they just "white"? Is imitating educated white culture a means of "uplift", or is it a betrayal of some authentic Black culture? Is the culture of jazz and sensualism as presented by writers like Van Vechten the authentic Black culture, or is it a stereotype of "primitivism" derived from white opinions of Blacks? Is integration with white society the goal, or a form of assimilation to be resisted? How is race related to questions of class and gender? These questions are not only relevant to Afro-Americans but posed in terms of "négritude" are debated in African literature, and perhaps in all the literature of the colonial and neocolonial countries. I read this book for a discussion group on Goodreads, and there is certainly much in this book to discuss.
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When Breath Becomes Air – Paul Kalanithi – 4****
This memoir was written when Paul Kalanithi was in his mid-thirties, about to finish his training as a neurosurgeon, and had been diagnosed with an aggressive lung cancer. I was interested and moved by his story.
LINK to my review
Honoré de Balzac,
Autre étude de femme
[1839-1842] 39 pages [Kindle, in French]This odd short work brings together characters from many of the novels and novellas of the Comédie humaine at a salon, where they tell parts of their stories and converse about various subjects, including the differences of women in different classes in France. The different parts were written separately and originally intended for other works, so Balzac here is just making use of his fragments which ultimately didn't fit elsewhere. It doesn't particularly work.
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Sworn to Silence – Linda Castillo – 4****
First in a series. This is a tight, fast-paced thriller. I really like Kate; she’s intelligent, resourceful, fiercely protective, determined and a strong leader. Readers looking for a “cozy” Amish book should look elsewhere. There is a violent sexual predator on the loose and the victims endure torture and physical violence. I will keep reading this series.
LINK to my review
Yaa Gyasi,
Homegoing
[2016] 305 pagesWritten by an author who was born in Ghana and grew up in the American South, this novel narrates the family saga of the descendants of two half sisters, one of whom (Effia) was "married" to the British governor, James Collins, and remained in Ghana, and the other (Esi) who was taken as a slave to America. The novel begins in 1778 (the author is very clear in indicating the ages of each character when they are first introduced, which together with a few dates allows the reader to figure out the chronology of each chapter to within a few years.) Each line is represented by six more generations, who are presented in alternating chapters at one important time of their lives. The novel covers both the history of Ghana, with the struggle against the British and the warfare between the tribes, and the experience of American Blacks in slavery and under Jim Crow, up to the independence of Ghana and about the present time in the United States (if my calculations are right, the final chapter is set in the late eighties or early nineties).
[SPOILER ALERT: The line which stayed in Ghana is represented by Effia's son, Quey Collins, who becomes the chief of his Fante village and marries into the Asante royal family; his son, James Richard Collins, who becomes a small farmer in an Asante village; his daughter Abena Collins; her daughter, Akua Collins; Akua's son, Yaw Agyekum, who becomes a professor and ultimately moves to the United States; and his daughter Marjorie, who is a college student. The American line is represented by Esi's daughter, Ness Stockham, a slave on a Mississippi cotton plantation; her son Kojo Freeman, who escapes to the North as a child and lives as a free Black; their son H, kidnapped back to the South, who after the Civil War becomes a coal miner in Pratt City, near Birmingham, Alabama; his daughter Willie Black, who goes north and lives in Harlem, married to a light-skinned Black who leaves her and becomes white (interestingly, after my just having read Larsen's novel Passing, she doesn't say he "passed", she says he "is a white man" but "used to be colored") and becomes very religious; her son Carson, called "Sonny", who grows up in Harlem, works for the NAACP for a time, then becomes disillusioned and gets involved in drugs during the 1960's; and his son Marcus Clifton, who is a student at Stanford.]
I thought the novel was very well-done, considering how much it covers; I didn't find the rapid changes between episodes difficult to follow, although some reviewers on Amazon had problems with that. The novel doesn't tone down the horrors of slavery and warfare in either country, but also doesn't describe them in such detail that it was difficult to read. I read this for a discussion group on Goodreads, and there should be much in this book to discuss, especially since the same group has recently discussed Whitehead's Underground Railroad and (in a different subgroup) Larsen's Passing.
Definitely Dead by Charlaine Harris
4 ★
I think I may have enjoyed this book the most so far. Sookie is finally beginning to figure out that she doesn't need a man around to be happy. She's showing some independence. Now, if she could just stay out of trouble! Sookie has to go to New Orleans to go through her cousin Hadley's stuff that was left to Sookie after her death. Quinn is back in this book and I just adore him. He gets caught up in Sookie's problems though, and finds himself kidnapped and beaten along with her. Sookie finds out a secret in this installment and it blew me away as well. So sad. And it took me awhile, but I figured out who was behind the attacks against Sookie. The author once again introduces many new characters who are all great pieces to the puzzle. So unique and interesting.
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My Mrs Brown – William Norwich – 4****
This is a lovely, charming story of one woman’s quest, at once modest and outlandish: to own an Oscar de la Renta sheath dress with jacket. Mrs Brown’s genuine goodness and politeness serve her well. Despite being the target of mean-girl behavior at work, and some serious setbacks, she perseveres quietly and consistently. It’s a wonderful fable, and I just love Mrs Brown.
LINK to my review
Honoré de Balzac,
La femme de trente ans
[1842] 220 pagesA novel which, like the previous story, was re-assembled out of various stories which had been published separately, this begins as a realistic novel about a marriage between a young girl, Julie, and a colonel in Napoleon's army, Victor d'Aiglemont, whom she initially idolizes but whom she soon realizes is a complete nullity. There is also a suggestion of sexual incompatibility, which of course Balzac could not describe openly at the time he was writing, so some of the motivations are obscure. They have a daughter, Hélène. The novel then goes on to two affairs, one, apparently never consummated, with an English lord trained in medicine and interned by Napoleon for the duration of the war with England, named Arthur Grenville, who dies in a melodramatic fashion, and one with a friend of her husband, Charles de Vandenesse, which results in a son, who dies in a melodramatic scene. As the novel progresses, it becomes less and less realistic, until in the story of Hélène it becomes totally Romantic with a murderer who becomes a pirate, completely unbelievable coincidences à la Dickens, and the death scene of the aged Julie in her youngest daughter's house. There are passing references to other characters in the Comédie humaine, but this is not a novel which adds anything new to the overall conception. La femme de trente ans is one of Balzac's least successful and least well-written books, but it does have some interesting psychological commentary. In the order I am reading them (I'm not sure where I got the list, which is different from the one given on Wikipedia) this is the last novel before Père Goriot, so I'm where I started out and a little over two thirds of the way through the Scènes de la vie privée.
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Kitchens of the Great Midwest – J Ryan Stradal – 3.5***
A debut novel that shows the writer’s promise. The story is told in roughly chronological order, but each chapter is told from the perspective of a different character. Through them the reader gets to know Eva, “the mysterious chef behind the most sought-after dinner reservation in the country.”
LINK to my review
Honoré de Balzac,
Le colonel Chabert
[1832] 81 pages [in French]A cavalry commander in Napoleon's army is reported dead, but actually survives with a severe head injury. Meanwhile, his property is sold and his wife remarries. The novel, narrated by the lawyer Derville (who appears in other novels as well) is about his attempt to get back his identity, and among other things is a satire on the legal system of the time.
The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls
5 ★
I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It was well written and I liked the format. Short sections within each part. There are no real chapters, but it's broken up so that you are able to put it down without stopping in the middle of something. Jeannette Walls lived an amazing life as a child. It was adventurous and fun. It was the childhood most of us dream of. Unfortunately, it didn't last long. Her father was an alcoholic and her mom an artistic dreamer. I envied her in the beginning and felt sorry for her toward the end. The truly amazing thing about her life is that she never let her life style define her. Same with her siblings. They all knew what they wanted out of life and went for it. They were bullied and picked on, but they all survived the lack of food, heat and indoor plumbing. I will say one thing about her parents, the instilled many excellent qualities in the children and made sure that they all believed in themselves. They knew that could do anything and be anything because of their parents. They were shown how to survive with nothing.
Tales of the Peculiar by Ransom Riggs
(Miss. Peregrine's Peculiar Children, #0.5)
4 ★
These stories are mentioned many times in the series and I was thrilled when they came out in a book of their own. The stories are entertaining and interesting. It's listed as book 0.5 in the series, but I would suggest reading it after the other books. You'll understand the peculiar lifestyle better and not be put off by the stories. Some of the stories actually explain things from the other books. This was an excellent addition to the series. The only thing I missed was all the pictures.
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Half Broke Horses – Jeannette Walls – 4****
In what she calls a “true life novel,” Walls turns her attention to her maternal grandmother: Lily Casey Smith. Walls is a wonderful storyteller; she really brings Lily and all the other characters to life. And what a life! The author also does a fine job of putting the reader into this time and place. I could practically smell the horses, and feel the dust on my skin.
LINK to my review
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Groot – Jeff Loveness (illustrated by Brian Kesinger) – 2**
Hmmm. Really don’t know what to say about this graphic novel / comics collection starring a talking tree with limited vocabulary, and a perpetually irritated Rocket Raccoon. Clearly I’m not the target audience, but I think I see the appeal. It satisfied a challenge and took my mind off my troubles for an hour.
LINK to my review
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Lucky Man – Michael J Fox – 4****
Michael J Fox was barely thirty years old when he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease. This is his memoir in which he explains how and why “I consider myself a lucky man.” He is honest and forthright in describing his childhood, early career, missteps, alcohol abuse, successes, and failures. I was interested and engaged in his story. Not your typical celebrity memoir.
LINK to my review
Hamid Mohsin,
Exit West
[2017] 231 pagesThis was not what I expected; I expected a fairly realistic narrative about immigration and the treatment of immigrants in Europe and America, with the "doors", which I had heard of, functioning sort of the same way as the trains in Colin Whitehead's Underground Railroad as a device for getting the protagonists into different situations without wasting time on the details of transportation. Instead, although it did present the lives of the protagonists in their own country and in exile in a fairly realistic way, the "doors" seemed to be essential to the story, as a kind of science fiction story about what would happen if borders could no longer be maintained in any practical way. I'm not sure whether the "doors" were intended as a "magical realist" device or whether they were somehow technological; I have read some actual science fiction stories about teleportation devices and the social consequences they might bring, but not focused so much on the question of refugees.
The novel is essentially a "love story", but with an ending which defies our expectations of the genre. It is about two young people, a man named Saeed and a woman named Nadia, who live in an unspecified Islamic country (the author is from Pakistan, but the country in the story seems to be more like the Middle East or perhaps Afghanistan), a country in which the extreme religious elements are winning against a less religious, more "Westernized" but disorganized majority and a government with little popular support. They meet at a University class and fall in love. Eventually, as the violence increases, they leave the country for the "West" through a "door", living first in a refugee camp in Greece, later as squatters in London, and eventually in a neighborhood in California. In each chapter there is a vignette of other people living in other places, which I expected would somehow combine with the main story but never did.
Two aspects of the novel impressed me. The first was that life in their own country was not treated as "exotic" or "primitive", but the author went out of his way to show the similarities with the "West", the stores full of consumer electronic devices, the dependence on cell phones (and the idea that a repressive government could isolate people so easily by cutting off transmission, now that land phones and other means of communication have become rare -- something to think about), and the typical student/young worker lifestyle. The other was that the nativists were not treated as simple ignorant villains, as just "haters", but that he showed that they were motivated by a real fear for their families, their religion and their culture (I think this is the message of the "vignettes" I mentioned)-- something easy to forget today when we tend to lump together all those who for example voted for Donald Trump with his anti-immigrant rhetoric with the neo-fascists and Klansmen of the alt.right. It's easy to say that they are trying to hold on to privileges which are illegitimate in a historical sense, to advantages which derive from the domination of the European countries and later the United States over the colonial world -- and Mohsin certainly doesn't deny that -- but they also believe, and rightly within the context of their individual lives within their own communities, that they have earned those advantages through their own work. While our sympathies -- and outside the novel, our political attitudes and activities -- certainly need to be with the refugees and their humane treatment and incorporation into the host culture, and against anti-immigrant and racial violence, we need to understand both sides of the question, and think about how to approach the anxieties of those within (and often at the bottom of) the host cultures. As long as we accept that there is a limited amount of economic resources, and accept that the top two or three percent have a right to most of it, then any redistribution of the rest means one group losing whatever another group wins, and racial, ethnic and religious conflict is inescapable. The author offers no solutions beyond understanding each other, which is a beginning but not enough.
Mohsin is perhaps better known for an earlier novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, which I previously had no desire to read, but after reading this I think perhaps that novel also is not what I assumed it was, so I may add it to my reading list for the future. I read this one for an online discussion group next month.
Nevil Shute,
A Town Like Alice
[1950] 279 pagesThis is one of the books for the Utah State Library book discussion for next month; I've seen it on several lists of modern classics, though I'm not sure why -- it's not a bad book but neither is it a very significant one. It's actually two historical novels with a common heroine; the first is a novel based on a real occurrence (though transposed from Sumatra to Malaya for some reason) about a group of interned British women who are marched around the country by the Japanese army, which doesn't know what to do with them, and the second takes the leader of that group to Australia after the war, where it shows her building up a small provincial town into a more developed one. The strong female character may be somewhat unusual for a book published in 1950, and both parts of the novel are interesting. The style is somewhat awkward, since the supposed narrator, a British solicitor who apparently gets his information from the heroine's letters, is rather too well informed about her personal life to be realistic, and the book would have been better with an "omniscient" narrator since that is what it actually is. The novel portrays, probably accurately, the British/Australian attitudes of the time towards race, without any comment, which might make it difficult for some readers; and the ease with which everything works out in her plans in Australia without any opposition is also somewhat unrealistic and seems a bit like "libertarian" propaganda.
[This review is based on an undated hard cover edition published by Amereon House. Note that the low overall rating on Amazon.com is from combining one star reviews for an abridged children's Kindle edition with reviews for other editions. When will Amazon wake up and give customers a way to distinguish reviews of the work as such, the expression (specific translation or edition) and the item (my copy had blah blah blah wrong with or it didn't arrive, etc.)?]
Honoré de Balzac,
Le contrat de mariage
[1835] 142 pages [in French, Kindle]The marriage between an elegant but weak young man, Paul de Manerville, and the spoiled daughter of a Spanish nobleman, Natalie Evangélista, is undermined from the beginning by a fight over the contract of marriage and the financial arrangements, which causes the mother-in-law to seek revenge against Paul. The plot is difficult to understand because so much depends on the intricacies of early nineteenth century law concerning marriages and inheritances. The impact is also weakened by a long monologue at the beginning and a long letter at the end by Henry de Marsay, an otherwise minor character in the novel (although one of the more important figures in the Comédie humaine as a whole) which present a misogynistic view of marriage and much irrelevant material about politics.
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Don’t You Cry – Mary Kubica – 2.5**
Quinn is a bad roommate, but when Esther goes missing, she’s concerned and determined to find the truth. Meanwhile, Alex is besotted with the strange woman, Pearl, who frequents the diner where he works. The plot is convoluted and complicated, yet somehow lacks suspense. I was not impressed.
LINK to my review
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The Dud Avocado – Elaine Dundy – 2**
The book jacket promises “the romantic and comedic adventures of a young American who heads overseas to conquer Paris in the late 1950s. Charming, sexy, and hilarious…” That’ll teach me to believe a book jacket blurb. There are some scenes where Dundy really captures my attention – the way she describes a perfect cocktail, or the guests at a dinner party, for example – but I was bored with most of it. Sally has no real purpose and I just didn’t care what happened to her or her “friends.”
LINK to my review
Honoré de Balzac,
La messe de l’athée
[1836] 29 pages [Kindle, in French]A portrait of a physician, based on a friend of Balzac, and certainly one of the fairest portrayals of an atheist by a Christian writer. The story is very slight – the narrator, Bianchon, a medical student, notices the famous surgeon and atheist Despleins attending a mass; he investigates and finds that Despleins has in fact founded the mass. He questions him about it, and Despleins explains that he was helped when he was himself a poor medical student by a water porter who was a believing Catholic, but by the time Despleins had established himself as a surgeon and become wealthy enough to do something for his benefactor in turn, the man had died, and the only way Despleins had to pay the moral debt was by establishing a mass for his soul.
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Under This Unbroken Sky – Shandi Mitchell – 5*****
This debut work just about broke my heart. Mitchell’s writing is luminous and poetic in places, making the landscape and weather central characters in the drama that unfolds in the last 1930s on the plains of Northern Canada. The novel touches on the immigrant experience, the harsh realities of prairie life, domestic abuse, faith, friendship, charity, pride, survival and forgiveness. This is a book, and an author, that deserves a wider audience.
LINK to my review
Tricky Twenty-Two by Janet Evanovich
(Stephanie Plum #22)
4 ★
I always love these books. This time Stephanie has to deal with fleas and the possibility of bubonic plague. All the great characters are back with a few interesting new ones. Morelli and Stephanie continue to get closer and Ranger continues to be sexy. Stephanie goes through many cars (as usual) and Lula hasn't lost her attitude. The whole book had me laughing and smiling. There was a bit of a surprise ending and I look forward to moving onto the next book to see where things go.
Mod
The Member of the Wedding – Carson McCullers – 4****
Twelve-year-old Frankie Adams is bored with life and longing for adventure, for a sense of belonging to something “bigger.” Carson McCullers has a way of writing her characters that draws the reader into their very souls. Frankie’s journey through this phase of adolescence is at once painfully distressing, funny and charming. I was, in turns, afraid for Frankie and amused by her.
LINK to my review
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Death in Yellowstone - Lee H Whittlesey - 1*
If you’re looking for a dry recitation of facts this is the book for you. If you are looking for a compelling, adventure / thriller try Night of the Grizzlies instead.
LINK to my review
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Night of the Grizzlies (other topics)Death in Yellowstone: Accidents and Foolhardiness in the First National Park (other topics)
The Member of the Wedding (other topics)
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