Josephine Tey

She read her first book on psychology out of curiosity, because it seemed to her an interesting sort of thing; and she read all the rest to see if they were just as silly. By the time she had read thirty-seven books on the subject, she had evolved ideas of her own on psychology; at variance, of course, with all thirty-seven volumes read to date. In fact, the thirty-seven volumes seemed to her so idiotic and made her so angry that she sat down there and then and wrote reams of refutal.

Josephine Tey "Miss Pym Disposes"

"The Man in the Queue"
"A Shilling for Candles"
"The Franchise Affair"
"Brat Farrar"
"To Love and be Wise"
"The Daughter of Time"
"The Singing Sands"

Fossum "Black Seconds" Topolski "Monster Love"

Missing children

Mysteries and thrillers that involve children can be gripping – “Judas Child” by Carol O’Connell and “Even Steven” by John Gilstrap are two I particularly enjoyed.
It is so easy to empathize because the children are so lovable, so fragile and in the case of O’Connell’s heroine sometimes incredibly feisty and more intelligent than their elders. Their disappearances, and crimes against them, tear up communities in a way that no other event can.

I thought I would quite enjoy Karin Fossum’s “Black Seconds” and I did – this was also my introduction to the fashionable jet-set of Scandinavian crime and mystery writers. As much as this can be said about a book where a child goes missing and then is found dead (without giving too much of the plot away), “Black Seconds” almost reminded me of “cosy” mystery series – there was a definite snug feeling about this semi-rural/suburban Norwegian small-town. Fear grows as the days go by and little Ida is nowhere to be found. Could she be held prisoner in some basement, or halfway across the world kidnapped by a pedophile? But as Fossum keeps bringing our attention back to family and neighbors another, perhaps less cruel but nonetheless tragic scenario begins to emerge. Inspector Sejer is a very likeable character even if his perspective doesn’t dominate the narrative (Ida’s mother, Helga takes center stage). A middle-aged loner (it wasn’t absolutely clear to me, not having read the previous books on the series whether he is still married but estranged from his wife, separated or divorced) he owns a very old leonberger dog, for whom he is contemplating euthanasia and engages in the obligatory consumption of alcohol, required of male detectives everywhere.

The first pages where Helga slowly becomes aware that Ida is late and, as the hours pass, missing, are wonderfully written. Even though “Black Seconds” ending doesn’t include a plot twist – which in a way is oddly refreshing – and the reader will very likely see his/her suspicions confirmed in the final pages, Fossum’s description of the characters’ psyche is masterful – it reads as something utterly simple and obvious – something only writers with a unusual mixture of understanding and eloquence can pull off (Josephine Tey being the best example I can think of).
“Monster Love” is something altogether different - Carol Topolski’s first book doesn’t follow a typical mystery form, but then, going back to Tey, neither does “Miss Pym Disposes” or “Brat Farrar”, mysteries that concentrate on psychology rather than the mechanics of crime.

Topolski seems to attempt something in the manner of Sayers “The Documents In The Case” a book in which the narrative is conducted solely through letters, depositions, notes etc, arranged in chronological order.
Here we have a series of testemonials, from neighbours, parents, employers and, as the narrative proceeds, police officers, a judge, jury etc. The case: a young, upwardly mobile, very fashionable and very ambitious couple abuse their little daughter in an horrible manner. The first chapters are very tight, very well written and they really drew me into the story. Charlotte, the neighbor; Anthony the boss; Kaye the social worker and Alun the police office, have very singular and powerful voices. The next chapter is narrated by the couple, Sherilyn and Brendan, made me wonder – I thought my questions would be answered latter on, but they never were. Then begin chapters narrated by mothers, stepmothers and stepbrothers – that’s where the book lost its promise as far as I was concerned – briefly regained in the judge and jurors chapters.

The biggest problem is, to my mind, a poor psychological construction of the abusive parents. Brendan and Sherilyn decide they never want children – they become pregnant through a very forced failed vasectomy plus a history of irregular periods which never gave Sherilyn any cause to suspect that something was up for about four months (no morning sickness for her then). Since they were rich, I can’t understand why they didn’t just hire a full-time nanny. If, as Topolski argues, the only problem in their otherwise perfect relationship was the presence of the baby and they were criminally inclined, why didn’t they smother her in her first few days and attribute it to cot-death or some such thing? Why would they bear her for three whole years, go through the trouble of building her a complex cell complete with lavatory and wooden cage just so they could abandon her for days on end? Since no-one ever saw the child it would hardly matter if she was alive. And having gone through the whole thing why would they suddenly leave the country leaving the baby where she could easily be found, along with the proof of the abuse, which was so easily hidden?

There is so much that doesn’t square with the author’s own portrayal of her characters, that it becomes annoying. It reads as if Topolski never really got to the bottom of Sherilyn and Brendan, and therefore cannot present them clearly to the reader. She tries this and that reasoning on for size –even clearing Brendan of any pedophile traits the reader might foist on him, through the (again forced) appearance of child molester.

“Monster Love” straddles an impossible divide: if on the one hand the family chapters serve the idea that abused children become abusive parents, it also seems to imply that people do cruel things for no reason. In the end I ended up not buying either explanation.

in the mean time...

Famous Last Words - Timothy Findley
The Devil's Highway - Luis Alberto Urrea
I Misteri D´Italia - Dino Buzzati
Beauty Tips from Moosejaw - Will Ferguson
Il Panettone non Bastò - Dino Buzzati
The Bird Man and The Lap DAncer - Eric Hansen
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian - Sherman Alexie
The Telling of Lies - Timothy Findley
The Fifth Business - Robertson Davies
Manticore - Robertson Davies
World of Wonders - Robertson Davies
Spadework - Timothy Findley
Gomorrah - Roberto Saviano
Duma Key - Stephen King
Snake Hips - Anne Thomas Soffee
Monkeys are made from Chocolate - Jack Ewing
Julius Winsome - Gerard Donovan
Ask the Parrot - Richard Stark
Ghosts of Spain - Giles Tremlett
Tell Me Where it Hurts - Dr Nick Trout
The Perfect Sister - Marcia Millman
Intern - Sandeep Jauhar
Friends and Relations - Elizabeth Bowen
The Edwardians - Vita Sackville-West
Dietro la Porta - Giorgio Bassani
Una Notte del '43 - Giorgio Bassani
The Yiddish Policemen´s Union - Michael Chabon

Findley "Famous Last Words" and Eng's "The Gift of Rain"

Although very different in narrative style both Findley’s “Famous Last Words” and Eng’s “The Gift of Rain” share a remarkable similarity. They both deal with characters that, through no clear ideological affinity, end up involved with “the wrong side” in the Second World War.

Both protagonists’ voices reach us from the past: Findley’s Mauberley through his last words written on the walls of four rooms in an Austrian hotel on the Alps, Philip Hutton’s through several flash-backs that lead the reader back to the british colonial outpost of Penang, Malaya, in the 1930’s.

If both books stress anything about their characters “wrong” choices it is how easily they slip into them. Mauberley and Hutton never make conscious ideological choices, in fact, the philosophy of war seems a remote concern in either man’s life. It is rather through personal affections, a sense of loyalty of above all else to friends and family that they find themselves unwillingly striking points for the forces of the Axis.

In a sense both men are traitors. Mauberley is an american whose first rumblings of war find in exile in Italy, living what can only be called a love-hate relationship with his mentor Ezra Pound (Selwyn Mauberley is a fictional character named after Pound’s poem), while Philip Hutton is a child of a marriage between a wealthy british businessman and a chinese woman. Yet Mauberley ends up collaborating closely with nazi officials and Hutton with the japanese occupying forces.

How could they? Both “Famous Last Words” and “The Gift of Rain” succeed in extracting from the reader the benefit of hindsight; both place us square in the middle of confusion, conflicting reports, misinformation, and the absolute necessity of maintaining sanity and dignity by keeping daily life as normal as possible. The big decisions are being made elsewhere, by others. Mauberley and Hutton seem to be carried most of the time, by a stream of destiny more hypnotic and powerful than rational thought. But can there be rational thought in the midst of war? The luxury of certainty, moral and ideological, is a privilege of heads of state and commanding officers, both works seem to suggest. The rest of us has to muddle through, unaware of secret plans (or in the case of Mauberley, further confused by repeated hints of international conspiracies) oblivious to the fact that the war will be over in a few years, and that future will be a harsh judge – maybe more cruel in the long run, to those who stray from their rightful birth alliances, than to those who merely followed their leaders.

The theme of destiny is stronger in Tan Twan Eng’s “The Gift of Rain”, the underlying leitmotif even. For the teenager Philip Hutton finding balance has always been hard (harmony being the other narrative force of the book): he is after all, of mixed parentage in a colonial setting – colonies being so often more british than Britain – with two older brothers and a sister born of his father’s first marriage with a british woman. His other half, his chinese mother, ostracized by her family, dies when he is only for years old.

When he meets a japanese man to whom his father has let a small island facing their house, whispers of shared destiny start to sound in his ears. In fact, Philip will soon understand that Hayato Endo, who quickly becomes his sensei in the art of aikido and japanese language, is not only an important companion in this life – they have been friends before, namely in the Japan of the samurai, and it has always ended badly. This time will prove no different even though Philip Hutton will, for the longest time deny the hold of destiny, a knowledge imparted by fortune tellers, and finally his own chinese grandfather.

His decision seems clear headed, in first days of the japanese occupation: to offer his services to the enemy forces in return for protection for his family who, unlike most of the british expatriates have decided to stay on in Penang. However, Hutton soon finds himself embroiled in the more cruel aspects of occupation by a political force eager to provide a well-known surname as an ally: he takes part in the round-up of, often innocent, anti-japanese “criminals”, watches, unable to help, executions, tortures and beheadings and soon his sister and aunt will join the numbers of political assassinations.

Yet his relationship with Endo never falters. Even when Philip comes to hate him, even when he realizes many of their friendly outings have actually been military fact-finding missions, and that he has unwillingly provided information that will make the japanese attack a resounding success, they never cease to be close. For Endo is after all, against the war. He has merely struck a bargain with the Emperor: work for the government in return for protection and medical care for his father, a vocal anti-militarist. Endo and Hutton are therefore as similar as enemies can be: two men trained to kill who avoid violence, who work for warmongers to keep their families safe.

Even though Philip Hutton eventually turns into double-agent feeding information to the anti-japanese resistance, both men’s actions seem to beg the question: how many lives would each of us be willing to sacrifice in order to save our loved ones? How easy to calculate a tally in times of peace.

Findley’s character, on the other hand, will participate in zero hands on brutality (safe his own cruel execution). He travels in what we might call the jet-set of war, between celebrity writers, italian aristocracy, british heirs, american gold-diggers and well-groomed nazis. Yet his actions will prove no less important: after all, how many elegant soirées were the planning grounds of war atrocities?

Mauberley, being an american, and an orphan at that (the first scene of the book consists of the young Mauberley witnessing his father’s suicide) has no close of kin to protect. However he does have a most juvenile characteristic: he becomes so powerfully inebriated by strong personalities that he forgets himself, and seems to long only to bask in their solar presence. First the young russian aristocrat he meets in Shangai in the 1930’s, followed by a young and already fiercely ambitious Wallis Simpson, Ezra Pound, the italian aristocrat Isabella Loverso and even a nazi hit-man.

Most definitely an aesthete, Mauberley is the sort of flighty platonic lover (though his homosexuality is hinted at he never consummates any relationship, and seems as likely to become fascinated by women as men) who doesn’t even realize his friend Isabella is actually a very active double-agent. As long as he can play his part in closest entourage of Edward VIII and his girlfriend Wallis all seems right.
In many ways then, Mauberley is a perfect agent for whichever side can most easily sweep him off his feet. Once suitably mesmerized he will, as a little boy, try to please the object of his affection to very best of his abilities. After Edward VIII’s abdication Mauberley feels Simpson’s hurt as deeply as if it were his own: she did, after all, marry the title as much as the man…

And it just so happens that a group of concerned industrialists along with nazi and fascist officials would much rather have a monarchy as symbol of their uber-totalitarian regime than the charmless Hitler. It would be business as usual of course, but with a certain flair only bestowed on Kings and Queens (even the ones born in Pennsylvania).

Mauberley is accosted by the so-called Cabal, never fully understanding who or what lies behind his contacts. However they do mean to offer his friend Wallis a throne (throne of what, however, is the important questions he never thinks to ask), how can he deny his assistance?

Caught in a writer’s interpretation of a conspiracy, Mauberley is never quite up to speed on the events: “What confused me most was that having been set up by Isabella Loverso to expect some mighty, earth-shaking scheme, nothing of the sort emerged.”
In the end, Findley’s character only seems to grow up when he is being hunted down for his diaries in the end of the war, which is actually when the reader first meets him. In attempting desperately to tell his story he seems a man that finally understands the bigger picture (or is he, certain of his impending death, merely grasping at posthumous celebrity?)

The irony, is that this man completely removed from ideological concerns or even with morality, ends up being scrutinized by two american officers (poster boys for righteousness if there ever were). Captain Freyberg is half-deranged after witnessing the horrors of Dachau, and probably thinks anyone who ever served a glass of water to a german is assessory to genocide, while the bleary eyed Lieutenant Quinn is of the school of thought that forgives everyone if only they make a final confession.

Mixing real and fictional characters and events “Famous Last Words” is a tightly wound, punch in the face of historical fiction, while “The Gift of Rain” is a sprawling, cinematographical, russian epic of war narrative.

When our time comes, will we excuse ourselves through the eastern concept of destiny or through the western one of art? Better start thinking about it, if not for this lifetime…

"The Two Sams - Ghost Stories" - Glen Hirshberg

Let me just start by saying that "Mr. Dark's Carnival", the third on this collection of short stories, is just about perfect. It's a fantastic little jewel on fear and folklore, dream-like, hypnotic and terrifying.

Without it, I probably would rate "The Two Sams" medium-well done - technically correct but lacking a certain "je ne sais quoi". There is no doubt Hirshberg has a first rate imagination. I was particularly impressed with the flashback in "Dancing Men": one minute we're in Prague accompanying a lonely middle-aged jewish high-school teacher whose yearly highlight consists of taking his class on european tours of Holocaust hotspots - when bang! courtesy of a local puppet merchant we're catapulted into his childhood in New Mexico, a vision-quest aided by a local native american, an Holocaust-surviving grandfather and then bang! again, further back into polish forests and gypsy magic. Very nimble.

"Struwwelpeter" is the name of an iconic, XIX century, children's story book, in which baddly behaved children get their comeuppance in a very graphic manner - in Hirshberg's tale we're left not knowing if evil Peter will get his, but with little doubt that he deserves it. "Shipwreck Beach" takes place in a very unusual set, as far as terror is concerned - Hawaii, and for that alone it deserves some points even though it felt a little laboured. By this second story a strange leitmotif in "The Two Sams" become apparent, one that I found quite original: humidity.

There is always slow steady rain, moistness, something dripping or oozing. Sure, when you think about it, getting into knee-deep water in the dark, or even hearing the strange, unidentifyable sounds of water is pretty scary and Hirshberg uses it in a very poetic and intriguing fashion.

The character's psyches is very compelling and feels truthfull: the boy in "Struwwelpeter" who is as attracted as repelled by the hidden cruelty he can sense in his best friend's eyes. The high-school senior in "Shipwreck Beach" feels the same about her cousin: her whole life she's known he's bad news and yet, though she doesn't even particularly like him anymore, she affirms her independence by travelling alone to meet him, heeding some "can't look away" call, young people so often feel towards familial disasters. The small boy in "Dancing Men" has less confused feelings towards the granfather he is forced to spend three days with. Trapped in a wheelchair, with an oxygen mask strapped on and unable to speak, his piercing eyes and his adobe house in the desert are every middle-class boy's very idea of horror.

The title story "The Two Sams" is more sad than scary. Hirshberg portrays the despair of a young couple whose wife is seemingly incapable of keeping a baby in her womb. After two miscarriages, the husband is convinced the foetuses are coming back to lure their new unborn child to their netherworld. The only way to stop them is to destroy the mournful fetishes his wife has lovingly wrapped and stored - the earthly remains of the first two children. This one would make a good film though, you can just imagine the ghost babies sneaking through the house at night and singing their chilling lullabies into the woman's stomach as she sleeps.

All very nice, but "Mr. Dark's Carnival" blows them all out of the water. I just love when a story grabs you in the first lines:

"So the first question, really," I said, leaning on my lectern and looking over the heads of my students at the twilight creeping off the plains into campus, "is, does anyone know anyone who has actually been there?"

The Eastern Montana History seminar, Halloween special, on a curious piece of local lore known as Mr Dark's Carnival, the ultimate scary house, is where the tale begins. Professor Roemer takes apart, piece by piece, the communal myth of Mr Dark, in front of the freshest batch of college students every year. Inside though, he is a true believer - or rather, if he unravels every phony account of the Carnival, it is only because he yearns to find the original, the only, the unimitable, the ultimate frightening experience. He is forced to cut his lecture short, after being told a brilliant yet volatile graduate student has commited suicide. Not long afterwards a hobo will press two invitations into his hand. And that's all I'm saying.

This is Hirshberg's own account of how the story was born.

Quite frankly I didn't understand the ending: was Prof. Roemer killed or brought back to the living? Yet I hardly cared.

"The Night Country" - Stewart O'Nan

Well, "The Night Country" has a Stephen King blurb on its cover, and I've often thought it would be a fun project to read every book that has one ("Three Dog Life" is another). I got it second hand without ever having heard of the author.

Between the master's (and Peter Straub's) recomendation, the title and the cover, I was expecting something quite different.

New England, Halloween. It's always tricky to encroach on another man's territory, and this is most definitly King's hunting ground.

But "The Night Country" starts off with a bang, the chapter "Something Wicked" which is something poetic, all right. An invitation for a ride on Halloween night with some unknown creatures who turn out to be three teenagers killed in a car crash exactly a year before. O'Nan gives them a voice more seductive than mermaids, as they convince, indeed seduce us, into witnessing their last moments:

"Come, do you hear it? The wind - murmuring in the eaves, scouring the bare trees. How it howls, almost musical, a harmony of old moans. The house seems to breathe, an invalid. Leave your scary movie marathon; this is better than TV. Leave the lights out."
(...)
"Do you ever wonder?
"Do you want to know?
Come then, come with us, out into the night."

It reminded me of the end of the first chapter of Kingg's "Danse Macabre", October 4, 1957, and an invitation to a dance, which goes:

"But it's not a hunt, it's a dance. And sometimes they turn off the lights in this ballroom.
But we'll dance anyway you and I. Even in the dark. Especially in the dark.
May I have the pleasure?"

There is nothing more enticing than being lured into that which scares us, through a soft spoken voice - it's also so much scarier to be enchanted so that we walk willingly (if a little bit wary) into the night, instead of being dragged out.

But then the next chapters (aptly named I know what you did and Dawn of the Dead) gave me a funny feeling I couldn't quite name. Then the next couple of chapters came and went and I finally understood that it was anguish. By then I wanted to finish "The Night Country" quickly because it started giving me nightmares. Only after I finished it, and as I thought about it and described did it slowly dawn on me how good it was.

It has to be one of the most unsettling books I've ever read. And O'Nan pulls a dirty a little trick on the reader looking for cheap thrills - you see, "The Night Country" isn't a horror book, at all.

Sure it has teenagers, is set on the days preceding Halloween and there are ghosts - but those are just treats to lure you into the big dark house. Once inside there are no carved pumpkins, no escapism, no scary movies that make kids scream and give boys and girls a chance to snuggle up to each other. Inside are lives so completely destroyed that not even death can save them. O'Nan forces us to look despair in the eye, and for my money it was the scariest thing ever.

Toe, Danielle and Marco met their untimely fate in the shape of a tree, on Halloween last year. They wander among the living, seemingly, a bit unsure what their new duties as ghosts are - except for being present whenever someone remembers them.

As it is, they spend a lot of time with Brooks, the police officer who, it slowly becomes clear, might have contributed to the violence of the accident by giving chase to the speeding vehicle. Unable to stop himself he goes over the photos of the scene almost everyday; his girlfriend left sometime ago and he is completely alone - his only living relative is an Alzheimer riddled grandmother who he visits as little as possible - another something-something to escalate is self-loathing.

Whenever we meet him he is alone in his patrol car, working nights, watching reruns of the crash in his mind, the girl projected into a tree, the moans coming from inside. He also follows Tim.

Tim is the one who got away. He came out of the accident with barely a scratch. He's fine - he just lost his girlfriend and two friends. Make that three; because although Kyle, a heavy-metal loving, marijuana dealing, every parents' teenage nightmare didn't die, he is now more Gump than Hetfield. He sports a crew cut instead of mutton chops, carries a lunch bag, and his mother helps him with his buttons, while Tim drives him to the convenience store where they both re-stock the shelves and clean the floor.

Kyle's mother might be the saddest of all these sorry characters - estranged from her husband who takes refuge in his work, taking care of a severely impaired son, she is denied even the refuge of grief, for she is too busy taking care of a five-year-old in the body of a seventeen-year-old - of all the inhabitants of the night country she is the only one whom O'Nan will deny a final respite.

This much we understand: that Tim wants to kill himself in an exact copy of the accident he survived; that Brooks somehow senses it and is determined to stop him; that the three ghosts cannot stop what is already in motion or even comfort the living with a word, an apparition or a dream, themselves trapped in broken deaths just as their relatives are trapped in broken lives. Kyle too has a ghost, a badass ghost, capable of some telekinesis it seems, but unable to see the other three even though they see him - and are scared of him.

O'Nan offers no redemption. This tale is not told in order to give the reader, in the end, a sense of lives being picked up, however crooked, a whiff of a new beginning. We leave the characters at midnight, just as the final blow descends - after, there will be nothing left to pick up.

My only qualm was the inclusion, in Tim's last moments, of the lyrics of The Smashing Pumpkins song "Today" - frankly it was too corny for words...

But it's just a little thing, it hardly matters. What does matter, what I was left suffering about was - who drive Kyle to work from now on and take him to MacDonald's once in a while? Who will visit Brooks' grandmother? How many ghosts will now follow Kyle's mother as she volunteers at the local library?

In O'Nan's "The Night Country" what gets wrecked, stays wrecked maybe even gets worse. As if tragedy can only draw out more of its kind, as if once broken, people cross out into another country where only silent ghosts, bad memories and the dark keep them company, until they too heed to the seductive voices of the dearly departed to take one last ride into the night.

Leonora Carrington - "The Hearing Trumpet"

Leonora Carrington is probably best known as a surrealist painter, and that is undoubtedly a shame if "The Hearing Trumpet" is anything to go by. A more delightful book is difficult to imagine.

One way to describe it would be as a Roald Dahl take on a Miss Marple mystery. Still it would be a way off. For Dahl would have to be informed by a grown woman's point of view - and that point of view would have to take in account the truly surreal life of Carrinton.

Whether or not, the young Leonora snipped her guests hair while they were asleep in order to serve them omelets stuffed with their clippings for breakfast, is truly besides the point. If she didn't actually do it, she at least thought of the prank which is too surreal for words.

Geographical constraints aside, her nanny is also supposed to have rescued her from a Madrid asylum where the young british debutant had been institutionalized (after a short-lived marriage with Max Ernst), by way of submarine. Once again Si non è vero è ben trovato.

"The Hearing Trumpet" has that cosy feeling only the british seem to get across with the surrealist touch of magic and color that one can't help but believe is consequence of Carrington's adopted country, Mexico.

Our narrator is an extremely lucid and good-natured, ninety-two-year-old. Marian Leatherby is perfectly content in the back room and garden of her son and his wife's home where she keeps two cats and two chickens and looks at the moon. Often she vists her friend Carmella, a sophisticaded mature woman who wears day-glow wigs and writes letters to people she chooses out of a phone directory (and is truly amazed they never write back, a surrealist at heart).

Marian's only handicap is that she is stone-deaf which most of the time does not take any pleasure out of her days. Unfortunately her son, and most importantly his wife, seem to find her an embarrasment, and her grandson agrees.

Petit-bourgeois that they are they take offence at the sight of old-age, and the fact that Marian has a beard doens't much help; neither does the fact that she likes to tell their dinner guests stories which, more often than not, lack a clear narrative line.

When Carmella presents Marian with a huge hearing trumpet, her deafness is solved. However, the first thing she hears is her family conspiring to put her away in an asylum.

Carmella takes her cats, and the maid the chickens (less fortunate) and off Marian goes to a surrealist asylum if there ever was one. The director and his wife seem to be involved in some sort of new-age cult the exact dogma of which is never very clear. The only thing required, besides some truly strange gymnastics, is for the women (it is a female asylum) to conform, forget about humour, curiosity and of course, voicing an opinion ("Personality is a vampyre", Dr Gambit avows). If however, one can feign a spritual connection to the other world as one of the women does, one is in the clear.

The women live in bungalows shaped as boots, cuckoo clocks, mushrooms, birthday cakes, igloos, circus tents and lighthouses. However the asylum used to be a catholic convent, and a strange portrait of a winking nun faces Marian everyday at dinner.

The story of Doña Rosalinda Alvarez della Cueva takes up part of the book, by means of a journal passed on to Marian, just as events seem to turn the way of a murder mystery: two women conspire to kill a rival (by means of poisoned brownies, how else?) and end up taking the life of another, glutonous woman, who on careful observation is not quite what she seemed.

Amid a mutiny in the asylum, late-night reunions where tribal drums sound, and where the elderly women find themselves compelled to perform strange dances, a strange creature is unleashed from the misterious tower which looks upon the compound.

Marian is led into a basement for a ritual initiaton and an ice-age ensues. It is all good fun, for Carmella arrives in a limousine driven by a chinaman with fur coats for all and an army of cats in tow, while Marian's long estranged friend, Marlbourough, arrives in an ark, straight from Venice, accompanied by his sister, a wolf-faced woman.

It is enough to make one crave for old-age if its going to be half as wonderful.

"The Hearing Trumpet" is a feminine book in which the few male characters are never as interesting as their wifes, mothers or sisters. There is no room for children, Marian's adolescent grandson is an idiot, and the adults tediously conservative, deluded, egocentric and full of their own importance. Only old-age, especially female, grants a magical eye and a colourful disposition, humour and serenity to withstand the adult world's boorishness. Cats abound and a small glass of "portuguese wine" makes everything endurable, especially coupled with a french éclair.

Alchemy is as attainable and delicious as tinned sardines. Wonderful.

Adolfo Bioy Casares - "Asleep In The Sun"

In "Asleep in the Sun" as in "The Invention of Morel", what happens, happens only in the last pages of the book.

In this sense the synopses of both Bioy Casares are somewhat misleading: they suggest a fantastic universe that will engulf the reader from the first pages, when really it's the other way around. What amazes in both books is how "normal" everything seems even with it clearly is not.

What conspires to make it so, is the very ordered and rational way in which both the unnamed narrator of "The Invention of Morel" and Lucio Bordenave tell their stories: they are utterly confused by the events which begin to take place in their lives and the only shred of sanity they can cling to, the only thing keeping them from complete madness is the careful, factual writing of their ordeals.

In "Morel" the journal of events is written for future perusal of persons unknown, while Lucio describes his story to a childhood friend, in order to beg his help. In "Morel" people appear where previously there were none, people who are unable to see or hear the narrator; in "Asleep In The Sun" the protagonist's wife comes back to him after being in an asylum, completely changed. What magic or science have the doctors worked upon her character?

Lucio's story can be read in many different ways of course, one of the most powerful might be as a satyre of modern psychoanalisys. But the important question is the one facing our narrator: if a loved one is transformed into someone devoid of all her faults and endowed with qualities you have always wished for, are they still the same person? Do you still love them?

The question is especially hard for Lucio who has always, if somewhat shamefully, believed he loved above all, his wife's beauty. As she is a very difficult person, one would believe Lucio should feel nothing but gratitude towards the doctors who took her away, for she returns, still beautiful but also loving, obliging, tender and humble.

However, Lucio cannot reconcile himself with the new Diana: she wants to take strolls in places she never cared for previously, has forgotten her most prized ability, cooking; never wants to leave the house except in his company, when before she went out alone and came back late at night, which caused Lucio a great deal of anxiety.

After fending off his sister-in-law's lewd advances in Diana's absence (all the more distressing because she looked so much like her sister); and battling the guilt of having allowed her institutionalization, (in one instance by acquiring a gentle alsatian, also named Diana, for the wife had been wanting a dog)the return of the new Diana is too much for Lucio to bear.

He starts, slowly, to become more and more distressed, and as he looks into his wife's eyes he cannot avoid the question "who are you?". The search for the truth about Diana's character change is finally what will plunge Lucio and the story into the fantastic, behind the walls of the asylum.

It is worth noting that in "Asleep In The Sun" the characters seem to be either wicked or clueless with not much space in between (except for his father-in-law who is both). The message might be that Lucio, and all good-natured people along with him, put their sanity at risk by wanting to find out the truth about the world. And also, that by wanting to seem perfectly reasonable and sane when faced with figures of authority (such as the doctor Samaniego), the insane and the mean, one is always taken advantage of.

More than once, I felt that the only thing that could save kindhearted Lucio was to allow himself a fit of hysterics and rage. But alas, that is the one thing he (or Bioy Casares)will not allow. Even in a world gone slightly mad, Bioy's characthers always believe pondered words will save them. The reader is all the more unsettled because he knows they won't.

Bassani, Bioy, Bulgakov, Colgate and Dahl

I feel a change coming on.

For months I've been concentrating on books which are either brand new releases or fairly contemporary, and while I'm not about to plunge head first into the so called "classics" I do believe I will be reading more and more "older" books.

Here are the five I've just finished:

Roald Dahl - "The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More"

Adolfo Bioy Casares - "The Invention of Morel"

Giorgio Bassani - "The Garden of the Finzi-Continis"

Isabel Colgate - "The Shooting Party"

Mikhail Bulgakov - "The Heart of a Dog"

Of these, the one I enjoyed the most was Bassani's. Set in the italian city of Ferrara just before the beginning of the II World War, it follows the life of a young jewish man and his relationship with a brother and a sister who happen to be the progeny of the wealthiest and most renowned jewish family of the city. The wonderful thing is how the book, a memoir told in the first person manages so skillfully to convey the intricacy and nuances of the jewish community (those who are observant, those who are not; those who are wealthy and those who are not; and those who supported the fascist party and their counterparts)while never loosing sight of the most important thing: for "The Garden of the Finzi-Continis" is first and foremost the story of a first (and unrequited) love between the narrator and Micól Finzi-Contini.
There are, to be sure, disquietening events (such as the expulsion of the young jews from the local tennis club) which point to tragedy ahead, but Bassani cleverly withdraws any suspense from the table: from the very first pages we already know none of the Finzi-Continis will survive the II World War. This allows the reader to give undivided attention to the events unfolding: the unnamed narrator's difficult relationship with a father who adores him but who is frighteningly unaware of the gravity of the political situation (as is most of the jewish community); a father who is quick to criticize the Finzi-Continis, and just as quick to bask in pride when his son becomes a good friend with the children of the family; the tragedy of Alberto's (the elder Finzi-Contini) homossexuality (which is merely hinted at, this being an italian book published in 1962); Micól's cryptic personality, who seems at times to flirt with the narrator just to rebuff him immediately afterwards; in effect, a normal nineteen-year old trying to grasp the complicated path between childhood friendship, adolescent fling and adult love; and the gentile Giampero Malnate (the objet of Alberto's affection) a young communist of the most intense and simultaneously, naive convictions.
But even tracing all of these (and several others) webs of relationships is just part of what made "The Garden of the Finzi-Continis" so engrossing - it is also incredibly visual, or maybe cinematographic is a better word. I finished it feeling as though I had walked the cobbled streets of Ferrara, cycled through the snow on a chilly night, walked the paths of the Finzi-Continis garden,climbed its stone walls, felt the warmth of their Palazzo and, of course played a whole lot of tennis.

Bioy Casares' "The Invention of Morel" was the hardest to read. I felt the author was determined in keeping me and my rational impulses at bay, which of course he was. The book is presented as the written log of an escaped prisioner alone in an island, for soon after his arrival strange events begin to take place. A party of revellers appears on the big house (called "museum") which exists on the island, but even though, our narrator falls helplessly in love with one of the women from the group, when he finally confronts her, the girl acts as though she does not see him. For the reader it is instantly obvious that she really does not see him, and we aim to find out why: is he dead? is she dead (along with the rest of the group)? is the narrator suffering from dellusions caused by the comsumption of indigenous berries? Is the "museum" a mental asylum where all the characters are institucionalized?
Why is Morel, apparently the leader of the group, forever engaging in mysterious conversations with the others where it is hinted that all will be solved in a matter of days? What are the strange contraptions kept in the basement of the building? Why are the tides impossible to understand and why, on certain days can two suns be seen in the sky?
Our narrator, obssessed with Faustine, and with the idea that the whole thing is a complicated ruse by the police, to capture him, is of little help to the reader. He states at the beginning that he means to keep his records as clear and scientific as possible, and this he does, the result being that we feel as though we are watching the events at a great distance. We forever want to yell at him "look out" or "over there, you fool"!
Faustine was inspired by Louise Brooks the silent film star and that got me thinking that there is a certain feel of a silent film to "The Invention of Morel". Just as our narrator cannot seem to communicate with his beloved (or any of the others on the island), so did I as a reader feel estranged from the action. But that wasn't necessarily bad, it was just incredibly confounding and strange.
The answer to the riddle of the island was completely unexpected and again, bewildering. It also poses all kinds of philosophical questions. Very unsettling, and yet I ran out to get another of Bioy Casares' books, which must mean something.

Dahl's book was a gift and what a gift! His short-stories might delve into the fantastic but I loved them because the writting is so old-fashioned. And what do I mean by that? I mean good ol' no-nonsese story telling, not made to impress anyone or in order to fill an assgnment for a creative writing course (on this subject read Stephen King on the NY Times).
When the world just seems incredibly grey and full of cinics this a great book to curl up with (meaning any given day).

Isabel Colgate's "The Shooting Party" is pure, unadultered escapism of the highest order. I almost felt guilty reading it, so quickly did I dive right in the story, set during a weekend of "sport" (the birds probably don't enjoy the aerobics much)in an english country mansion, in 1913. If I could have gone back in time for a day, this would be a top destination. Julian Fellowes's introduction to the Penguin edition explains why, in 1980, this was a daring, even revolutionary book (Fellowes was the scripwriter of "Gosford Park"), which is all very well and good, but today it is hardly shocking, only great, which is even better.
You can hardly mistake "The Shooting Party" for a period piece since the servants are not only seen, but also heard. What's more they also think! There is even an (admitedly naive at least politically)animal rights campaigner/socialist at hand. A wealth of characters between the host family, their guests, their servants and workers provides a rich canvas for Colegate who achieves with equal sucess the voice of Ellen, the maid or Sir Randolph Nettleby. There are exotics, (an hungarian count and a jewish businessman from South Africa) mean gentlemen, clueless young girls, salt of the earth men, generous women and a couple of prodigious young people from both the "upstairs" and the "downstairs", not to mention a pair of star-crossed lovers and a dead body at the end (without which no english country weekend is complete).

Bulgakov's "Heart of a Dog" is a small book, which feels tiny after the lenght and breath of "The Master and Margarita". It is a satire in which an imminent Moscow doctor transplants the pituitary gland and testicles of a man into a stray dog, who shortly after starts to metamorphosize into a human and to develop the character flaws the donor displayed while alive (alcoholism and thievery), while also displaying the particularly irritating trait (for Doctor Preobrazhensky, at least) of taking up with the building commitee which is composed of ignorant and agressive revolutionaries.

"Kartography" - Kamila Shamsie

The city of Karachi is the main protagonist of "Kartography", a city where the streets truly have "no name" and where directions are intimately tied with events.

It may be violent, chaotic and "brazilified", with the wealthy taking their cars between mansions and country clubs, but Shamsie had me believe it is also magical - somewhere beauty is hard to come by and all the more unexpected and precious because of it.

The story centers around a childhood friendship between Raheen and Karim. Just when they step into adolescence and could have naturally evolved into boyfriend and girlfriend, Karim's father decides to take his wife and son to London and away from the escalating sectarian violence in the city.

The distance creates some misunderstandings, but the greatest one is caused by family history, for Karim's mother was once engaged to Raheen's father, and the boy's mother to the girl's father. What happened is intimately connected to the political violence of 1971, when Pakistan fought East Pakistan (Bangladesh), and to the ethnic groups each of the grown-ups belong to.

How much (or how little) Raheen and Karim know about these events will drive a wedge into their friendship, even though they never discuss it openly.

After boy and girl separate at Karachi's airport, each 13 years old, we next meet Raheen at an Ivy League university in the States. Frankly I didn't much enjoy that part: I kept feeling I'd read it before in some other book.

It's complicated, because the reality is that so many Pakistani, Indians, Chinese etc do go to universities in the U.S., many to study writing (like the author)and yet on the page, those experiences usually read like a cliché.

The other thing is that Raheen, our narrator, grows up to be less than likeable. At 13 she is a spirited young thing, but at 20 she's a bit of a sulker, unable to withstand any real affection from men, and she really does believe everything is about her.

In all honesty many 20 year olds are like that, but it sure gets a little grating. But never mind, soon Raheem and Karim, along with best friends Zia and Sonia are back in Karachi and "Kartography" really takes off - scaling violence and political unrest seem to conspire in order to throw our protagonists into similar tragic situations as those faced by their parents 20 years earlier.

There are many interesting map lines in "Kartography": the different kind of emigrants Raheen and Karim become (she, oblivious to the political situation of her country; he, obsessed by it); the subplot of their parents tale explained in separate chapters dated 1971; and the shifting identification of country, social class and ethnic group.

Overall, "Kartography" is an enjoyable book, though it left me with some nagging questions. There seem to be a lot of young writers, born in third world countries and educated in anglo-saxonic universities who rely on their regions of birth for their subject matter. In itself, that should hardly constitute a problem, but good literature needs more than a first hand knowledge of an exotic location.

One gets the feeling that in american universities these writers are urged to "write about what you know", and so they do. But they seem to aim at a western audience and so, play the "exotic" card rather heavy-handedly, while the main characters, the narrators, are of an almost absolute western sensitivity.

I don't really know what driving at exactly, except that of course, I want my books set in Karachi or Beijing or Seoul, but maybe I don't need the "benefit" of a american/ british university educated narrator every time.

Would those books get published quite as easily? I don't know.

I guess I used to be more naive about book publishing and have only recently started to realize that, like everything else, it is also political. There are many new writers who come from different ethnic backgrounds being published in the U.S. yet, it seems to me that most of them, besides being mostly female, have in common a degree in "Creative Writing" of some sort in a well-known university. Sometimes I fear they are all being coaxed into writing in a certain way by american professors, or worse, that only those who do, get published.

"The Baby Business" - Deborah L. Spar

"How Money, Science, And Politics Drive the Commerce of Conception"

I truly believe reproduction is going to be one of the most important political issues of the next century. You only have to look at abortion being discussed back and forth, to realize that women's reproductive rights are far from being a settled issue.

Spar's "The Baby Business" is fascinating stuff even for those, like me, who are severely impaired when it comes to economics. The author is a professor at Harvard, but the book keeps away from pie charts and complicated theories.

There are however, many facts that everyone can understand: 12 thousand dollars per round of IVF (usually amounts to 60-100 thousand dollars before the couple gives birth); 4500 dollars for an egg (on average, since it can go much higher than that); 300 for sperm; and, on average, 25 thousand dollars for an international adoption.

These numbers relate to the american market, and there are some countries who provide assisted reproduction as part of the national health program. Still, it is staggering.

The aim of Spar's book is to show clearly that reproduction is a business, and for many clinics, pharmaceutical companies and adoption agencies it is a very big business. Prospective parents don't of course, view themselves as consumers, anymore than society considers babies a product, and yet, there is no doubt that infertility, or the need for a child, created a market, and a fast growing one, at that.

And where there is demand...

Western society has been consistently looking the other way while the reproduction business regulates itself in the absence of legislation, and the result, for now, is a society where the wealthy can use every kind of technology to have babies (and when that fails, adopt one), while poor women are unable to control their own reproduction.

Spar makes a strong case regarding the economy, and resolutely keeps away from the ethics. What she wants is a political eye and hand involved in this (especially in the U.S.A.) un-regulated market.

But there is much in "The Baby Business" that will have the reader keeping his/her own moral score - it is impossible not to.

I was especially surprised at finding out that in America, black women of modest means, are often employed as surrogates for white couples. The reason? The different ethnicity of the baby, would make it harder for the surrogate to establish her rights in regard to the child in court.

International adoption is an even harder subject to tackle, but one that I suspect will come under harder political scrutiny faster than IVF or other "technological" reproduction techniques. For how can we be sure that the mothers of these babies where not put under pressure to give them up for adoption (in Guatemala (2) the subject has already been raised)? If they are indeed orphans in need of good homes why do the prospective parents pay 25 thousand dollars? Who receives this money? Can we be sure we are not creating a market that will try its hardest to survive, and even thrive?

Are we creating a society where the poor will be reproductive machines for the rich: egg and sperm donors, surrogate wombs, biological parents? Where only the wealthy will be able to benefit from genetic advances that can predict which life-threatening diseases (and even physical traits)a certain embryo possesses?

Debora Spar does not provide answers to these moral questions but does, rightly, insist that we are keeping from looking to closely at "The Baby Business" at our own peril.

"Like A Sister" - Janice Daugharty

The fifties in America are usually portrayed as an age of unprecedented wealth, which they certainly were, for many. Stay at home mothers, television, supermarkets and one automobile in every suburban garage.

Daugharty's "Like A Sister" presents a different reality. Set in a small Georgia town in 1956, the book takes the reader through a few tragic months in the life of Sister, a 13 year old girl.

Neglected by her young mother Marnie and her new boyfriend, Sister spends most of her days and all of her summer vacation acting as a mother to her 10 year old twin brothers and baby sister. She yearns to be "respectable" like her neighbour Willa Lamar, without knowing exactly what that entails other than wearing shoes on the street, not sleeping in her day clothes and going to church.

Unfortunately for her, the citizens of Cornerville seem to have made up their minds: the Odumses are nothing but white trash, and whatever goes on in the back room of the cafe her mother and boyfriend have taken over, it is most certainly not respectable.

Sister loves her mother almost as much as the woman ignores her and her siblings, and like so many abused children is fiercely protective of Marnie: she tears petitions tacked to the door of the restaurant, hides a charred cross she finds one morning in front of the cafe. When, one night, she watches, unable to move, men dressed in white hoods assemble in front of the cafe, her most powerful emotion is shame - she feels as if she should be helping her mother.

Both the southern dialect and the geographical precision of the descriptions make "Like A Sister" an absorbing read. We feel the hot tar under Sister's feet as she makes her way across town, her little body growing tired and crooked as she carries her baby sister (a baby which, almost a year old still has not been given a name by her mother) on her hip up and down the road all day long.

In the end, though, it is Sister herself that makes Daugharty's book so poignant. A child so beaten down she doesn't even question the morality of the slimy local politician's attention: she knows it's got something to do with "sex", and even though she ignores what that means exactly, is aware at that young age that it is some sort of currency between men and women and tries repeatedly so convince herself to enter the bargain; a girl that is so aware of her own status in the small town that she is grateful that none of Willa's daughters are in her class at school - even though they all play together at home, she doesn't expect them to acknowledge her there.

When her mother finally decides to leave her behind and keep on moving, the girl is so desperate to convince Marnie that she will not be a burden, that she offers "We could both be whores" and means it. Sister would do anything, even after her siblings have been placed in adoptive homes, even after Willa has offered to take her in, to keep close to this woman who is nothing more than footsteps coming in late at night, shouts behind a closed door and far way memories of happier times.

It is while refusing to believe she has been left behind, while keeping the lights on so her neighbours will believe she is not alone that Sister falls prey to the sexual attack that has been eminent throughout most of the book.

What happens next is a particularly satisfying kind of revenge - the kind that southern women seem to be so deft at, cleverly hidden behind macadamia pies, iced tea, pink sundresses and the scent of magnolias - with help of the respectable Willa.

Of my latest reads, only Jim Harrison comes to mind as an author so firmly anchored in a sense of time and place - enough to make you live there while you read, and take you back whenever you remember it.

"Foreskin's Lament - A Memoir" - Shalom Auslander

And now for something completely different.

See, maybe Coupland is on to something when he moans about not growing up religious: it most definitely will mess you up, but then you'll get to write an incredibly funny book.

I read the first chapter online and knew immediately I had to read "Foreskin's Lament" as quickly as possible. I've just finished it, and now I want to get as many people as possible on board so we can all start using my favourite sentence in unison: "That would be so God".

There are so many books coming out every month on finding God, or at least some new-agey version of the guy/gal, that the whole prospect of someone trying desperately to loose him is already a winner.

Shalom Auslanderwas raised in an jewish orthodox community in the state of New York and that wasn't his only problem: his father was abusive and his mother withheld affection in exchange for religious compliance. If he was smart, he should have become a rabbi (he did dabble, briefly, with orthodoxy in his late teens)and saved himself a whole lot of trouble.

Instead, since the age of nine he became an avid non-kosher binge-eater, consumer of pornography (here, he didn't stray from family tradition, we soon find out) and not much later, a doobie smoking, yarmulke wearing, serial shoplifter.

How can you possibly go wrong with this kind of material?

Auslander doesn't and his childhood and coming-of-age are rendered even more dramatic from his narrative standpoint: at 35, he has just barely gained some much needed geographical and emotional distance from his family when he's hit by the one great feud voider of adult life, the first-born.

I don't really know if Auslander's book is as hilariously funny the absence of any kind of religious upbringing, but I'm pretty sure it's non-denominational: I had only a mild catholic education, but a lot of it rang true, especially the constant dread of punishment and the little deals you make with God in order to (try and) get something out of the bearded one.

The ironic tragedy of Auslander's position is not that he isn't religious, of course, but that he his. But like many others he sees a wide gap between God and the seemingly random prescriptions that organized religion sets up around him, the way that rabbis and priests want to be the sole brokers of a relationship that should be personal and maybe a lot more private.

That many people in religious communities are not as pious as they would have other believe, is a given. That a mother would cast her own child away for non-compliance is harder to swallow - or maybe not, given that whole Abraham-Isaac episode.

In the end, saying "Fuck this shit" and going out on your own way, is how many of the world's religions got their first break. At least, that's what Auslander is telling himself, and those of us with any sense will be shouting "Amen!" as he goes forth to find his own, private, Promised Land.

"I believe in a personal God; Everything I do, He takes personally."

"The Gum Thief" - Douglas Coupland

This one had me stumped for days. I finished it last sunday but I just couldn't make up my mind on "The Gum Thief".

The thing is, I couldn't believe Coupland actually wrote something so mediocre and derivative and was trying desperately to justify it. But I can't - if "The Gum Thief" had been written by an unknown author, I believe it would never have seen the light of day, and readers everywhere would have missed absolutely nothing.

I read "Generation X" when I was 12 or 13 years old and became a fully fledged fan at 16 with "Life After God". I grew up reading Coupland and he is probably the one author of which I read everything (fiction). I loved the "uppers" ("Shampoo Planet", "Microserfs", "Miss Wyoming", "All Families Are Psychotic") and grew to appreciate the "downers" ("Girlfriend In A Coma", "Hey, Nostradamus", "Eleanor Rigby"). Last year's "JPod" felt like his best work ever.

So I was looking forward to "The Gum Thief", set in Staples and featuring Roger, a divorced forty something and Bethany a twenty-something goth. After the first entry by Roger, though, the book just seems to go nowhere, slowly. I had to force myself to keep going - I actually fell asleep three times reading it (and not at night).

It's not just the fact that so many of the ideas are recycled from previous novels (life after a certain age is meaningless and empty; fear of the pending apocalipse; sadness at the absence of faith, or at least a religious education; loving the new, hating the old ergo, hating Europe; fear of not being able to love or connect with other human beings)because Coupland always played around with the same set of fixed notions. And it's not that the format of narration (circumscribed to written communications between Roger, Bethany and her mother) seems to keep the characters and story at a fuzzy distance.

It's just that it's no good. And while on the one hand, I got the feeling that Coupland was aiming at a younger audience of new readers (hence the summary of all his ideas), on the other, it was pretty clear that his heart wasn't in it.

"The Gum Thief" makes life seem completely bleak and hopeless, and then, in the very last pages, as Bethany tries to take her own life, Roger (who certainly contributed to her feeling that way)suddenly changes his tone dramatically and tells her, in a completely sappy epistle, that life is worth living: sure, there's not any real hope of attaining knowledge or happiness, but hey...it's great to be alive!

Honestly, it felt like the last, life-affirming and then "hey, the whole thing was a joke! Lighten up!" pages were ordered by the publisher, in an effort to curtail a wave of teen suicides in British Columbia.

Look, don't spend 250-plus pages persuading me that life in the new millennium is utterly hopeless and depressing and then try to tell me you don't really mean it. That's just wrong.

As for "Glove Pond" the novel within the novel, that Roger keeps feeding Bethany and that critics found "a camp reconstruction of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” directed by a young John Waters" and "campily funny", I thought it was beyond terrible. I still don't know what the point was, and if there was one, it still doesn't justify how completely uninteresting it was.

My husband had a dream where I said "Look not only Douglas Coupland doesn't want to grow up, he also doesn't want his readers to grow up". I don't know if that's it, but "The Gum Thief" left me feeling a little sad. I almost wish it had left me feeling old.
That, I could deal with.

"Free Food For Millionaires" - Min Jin Lee

Min Jin Lee's first book is quite the tour de force. For starters its length is staggering at 560 pages but it is also ambitious in the number of characters it follows during a period of more or less five years.

The protagonist is Casey Han, daughter of korean immigrants in the United States. Just out of Princeton where she studied economy, we first meet her during a stressful family dinner after she has just decided to defer her entry into Columbia Law School for a year.

Her parents are very conservative and her father in particular expects nothing short of complete devotion and obedience of the two sisters (Casey's sister Tina is going to Medical School). The dinner ends in a violent confrontation where Joseph Han strikes his daughter and tells her to leave her home permanently. Casey goes home to find her white boyfriend engaging in a threesome.

These are the events that set "Free Food For Millionaires" in motion. Casey is an extremely likable character: though she has gone to Princeton and engaged in most of the social activities the university threw her way (vacations in the Hamptons, eating clubs, golf) she doesn't consider herself an Ivy leaguer. The fact is, her parents work in a dry-cleaners (the family has never had a vacation) and live in Queens, and even though she is loan-free because of a scholarship she can hardly indulge in the sort of carefree spending that seems to go with the territory. Not for Casey the benefit of a masters degree in Italy (in which her best friend Virginia is about to embark), or the gift of a Manhattan apartment bestowed by her father (such as her childhood friend Ella receives). She doesn't even have the financial support of being admitted into a banking program like her boyfriend.

She has no job, ambivalent feelings toward a career in either finance or law, and her love of well tailored and expensive clothes and hats, quickly throws her into a bottomless pit of credit-card debt. Whenever she can, she slips off into a rooftop or terrace and smokes about five cigarettes in a row.

Following Casey in her after school years, as she grows estranged from her parents and searches for meaning, money and love, would have been more than enough. Yet Lee, influenced by an admiration of XIX century novels (as she states in this interview), gives voice to the stories of many other secondary characters. And this is where the book lost its stamina, and freshness as far as I was concerned.

It is arguable that Casey's goody-two shoes friend Ella, deserves her own story, as does her korean-gone-mogul boss, Sabine, her sister Tina, her mother Leah, Virginia or her co-workers - even Ella's husband Ted gets his two cents - but I constantly felt as if Casey's voice was being robbed of depth in order to accommodate this vast cast of supporting actors. And more often than not, their respective episodes felt forced and stilted.

At the beginning of part II I was surprised and upset when I was told two years had passed - what had Casey been doing and thinking those 24 months?

And there was little final resolution for many of the characters. Tina, the younger sister, I felt was especially badly treated by Lee's choice of narrative: just as she shows some sign of being more than the dutiful daughter we abandon her broke, taking an indefinite break from med school in order to take care of her first-born. Casey's mother is also left at an impasse after having a miscarriage, being made pregnant by her choir director.

Even Casey's finale is left vague: she probably won't go to business school, or will she? Is getting back with the boyfriend she so carelessly cheated on?

There were great moments in "Free Food For Millionaires" and I wouldn't necessarily say no to another book by Lee. But after more than 500 pages I was left with the feeling that the real story was about to begin just as the book ended.

"Franny And Zooey" - J. D. Salinger

"It's everybody, I mean. Everything everybody does is so - I don't know - not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid necessarily. But just so tiny and meaningless and - sad-making. And the worst part is, if you go bohemian or something crazy like that, you're conforming just as much as everybody else, only in a different way."
Franny

"Phooey, I say, on all whiteshoe college boys who edit their campus literary magazines. Give me an honest con man any day."
Zooey

On college professors:
"They make everything they touch turn absolutely academic and useless - Or worse cultish."

Well, you get the gist of it. Franny and Zooey are sister and brother, 20 and 25 years old respectively. The year is 1955 and the kids are going wild - actually, they seem to be going mental. They are obsessed with acting in almost the same way they are obsessed with zen buddhism, hindu sacred texts, and christian sects - but mostly, they can't stop going on about how everyone else is so dense and frivolous, so absolutely incapable of glimpsing their deep personal moral dilemmas.

Well screw Franny, Zooey and Holden while you're at it. You know what it is, don't you? These kids are rich. Period. That's their number one problem. 1955, 2005 whatever. They're still around, looking pretty and distraught at the lack of meaning, Truth and beauty in life. But guess what? They never worry about the rent, carfare or lunch.

They all annoy the hell out of me. But. I'll never be that witty, dahling. Nor that insightful. Like it or not, Franny's evaluation of campus life, the self-aggrandizement of teachers and general emptiness of students is still true today. It still drives many away from college and turns many more slightly insane.

Franny and Zooey aren't lovable - they are much too self-conscious for that. But at least they don't seem to make up excuses for themselves. In a way, they know they are privileged and detest the way they can't just blend with the crowd of Ivy league nitwits. They are both exceptionally clear-eyed about human nature - which, no matter what anybody says, is not, necessarily, a good thing. They are fiercely critical and more than a little judgemental - also, of their own motivations.

You probably wouldn't want neither of them as friends but you end up wishing them well. For Franny and Zooey, despite their background and upbringing (or precisely because of it), are the kind of young people you could imagine being institutionalized a few years down the road.

It can be argued that right beside Holden Caufield they are J. D. Salinger's closest alter egos. They are a little bit mad and a little bit sad. Sometimes they talk like insufferable snobs and sometimes they're right on the money. Just to be on the safe side we best keep a couple of them around. Preppy kids keepin' it real, and all that.

"I don't think it would have all gotten me quite so down if just once in a while - there was at least some polite little perfunctory implication that knowledge should lead to wisdom, and that if it doesn't, it's just a disgusting waste of time!"
Franny

"The Wars" - Timothy Findley

The War to end all Wars - more than 5.ooo.ooo dead, almost as many missing, 12.ooo.ooo injured.

Findley's 1977 "The Wars" is the story of a nineteen year old canadian, Robert Ross, who enlists in 1915 to fight in World War I, and is driven, partly through his own character and partly as a response to the bloodshed and cruelty he witnesses, to perform an act of both madness and beauty.

The story is told by an unnamed historian, who relies on photographs, letters documents and interviews in order to trace Robert's story from his childhood in Canada to his death.

Findley has been described as a great "teller of tales" but to my mind his strength lies elsewhere. It is not that his stories are imaginative, which they are - rather, they make up a whole world into which the reader dives, retaining not an ounce of disbelief. Just as in "Pilgrim" written 22 years later, "The Wars" is an entrancing book, which kept me mesmerized for the two days it took to read it.

Once in it, you can barely stand to look up from its pages, and while reading it you loose all sense of being a reader - you are someone who has fainted, or has fallen into a particularly heavy nap, and been transported, not into a dream world, but into a reality so far hidden from your personal knowledge, that is nevertheless, undeniably true.

Cleverly weaving his descriptions into the action, Findley never allows you to slip from his grasp. "The Wars" has no descriptive features that aren't part of the narrative - everything you see, hear and smell is rendered through your different narrators with the natural rhythm of life and death.

You go down the steps to the hold of the S.S. Massanabie with Ross and smell the stench of hundreds of horses kept frightened in their own filth, with not a single porthole opened for fresh air, you see the only light provided by an oil lamp and feel the heaving of the ship. Your own revulsion is indistinguishable from the boy's as he is required for the first time in his life to kill a living being, a horse that has fallen and broken his leg, and you see the white of the horse's eyes as he stares with confusion and pain at his murderer.



It is in the trenches, where Robert is kept from the front line through his officer status, that the madness of war quickly starts to pour through: some of the boys go mad, some turn into cruel beings, most simply die.

Then there is Rodwell, a man who does the unthinkable: in the middle of the carnage he collects small wounded animals, birds, rabbits, hedgehogs, toads and nurses them in a makeshift hospital under his bunk bed. His suicide, after he is forced to watch the torture of a cat by his comrades in arms, and the letter he leaves Robert to deliver his daughter, provide the emotional climax of "The Wars".


After a leave of absence in England, Robert goes back to the front and the events precipitate: he is raped by fellow officers whose identities he will never know and from there on we feel him slowly retreating into his own mind. He is constantly, inexplicably, spared while men all around him are killed during attacks.

It is in the aftermath of one such attack that Robert, accompanied solely by a black mare and a dog he has found among the debris, sets loose one hundred and fifty horses trapped into a burning train. He means to save them, and stables them nearby, but the army is, of course, in pursuit of the young traitor.

The horses end up burned alive and we are denied the relief of seeing Robert go down in martyrdom with them. He would survive, horribly disfigured, to be court marshaled and die at 26.

"Someone once said to Clive: do you think we will ever be forgiven for what we've done? They meant their generation and the war and what the war had done to civilization. Clive said something I've never forgotten. He said: I doubt we'll ever be forgiven. All I hope is - they'll remember we were human beings."




During his months on the front Robert Ross killed three people: inadvertently, a german soldier who was assisting his escape, a senior officer who prevented him from saving a herd as their stable was under attack, and a soldier who tried to stop him as he made his final ride surrounded by 150 free horses.

"Joe Gould's Secret" - Joseph Mitchell

"Joe Gould's Secret" is made of two different articles, both published in The New Yorker about a down-and-out poet and would be historian, resident bohemian at several Greenwich Village diners and bars, Joseph Ferdinand Gould.

The first, shorter piece is dated 1942. Joseph Mitchell was writing profiles of New Yorkers with an eye toward the excentric and unusual and Gould seemed a natural fit. He had been traipsing around the Village for years, much of the time drunk, gathering an informal circle of friends (and some enemies) among the more famous poets and artists of the neighborhood, whose hand-outs kept him just one step ahead of homelessness and hunger.

The interesting bit of curio about Gould was his monumental work in progress: a massive Oral History (of the world) in which the conversations of everyday people (and some famous ones) where noted down in grammar school writing pads.

"Professor Seagull" is funny and tragic, but it is the second, lengthier "Joe Gould's Secret" written twenty-two years after, that brings Gould and Mitchell's characters into focus while allowing a very rare glimpse into the backstage of journalism. It is here that we learn what happened after, the way that life muddied the carefully written words of the author.

Gould became a frequent and with the months passing, unwelcome, visitor of Mitchell's office almost every week. His verbosity would not be stopped and the journalist, ever the southern gentleman, becomes an unwitting confidant of every detail of Joe Gould's life story.

For, putting the ambition of his Oral History aside (of which Mitchell never saw a single page during the first assignment), it is his own life that seems to capture Gould's every waking thought: the son of a wealthy and puritan New England family, he was unable to fulfill his father's expectations but, though he left home at a young age, never solved his heartbreaking relationship with his parents.

The reader sharply feels Mitchell's discomfort of being inconvenienced by the mostly drunk, repetitive Gould to the point that he tries, quite frantically, to get a publisher interested in the Oral History, seeing it as the only means of getting the old man off his back.

It is Mitchell's stepping forward in "Joe Gould's Secret" that makes this book such a treasure: we witness his southern traits of politeness, loyalty and honour as they shape this remarkably honest chronicle of what came after the final period. The reader empathizes with his frustration, suspicion, anger and finally the respect he develops toward the tragic Gould.

If the Oral History is but a figment of Gould's alcoholic and mentally ill mind, is it less remarkable just because he failed to put the words on paper? Is the absolute truth the most ethical course of action where dignity and respect are concerned? These are the questions Mitchell grappled with for decades before setting down to write "Joe Gould's Secret" - his answer is to look the reader straight in the eye and tell a sad story that is not only a beautiful epitaph to his subject, but also a testament of undying admiration to the city of New York, its fools and holymen.

"The Enchanted April" - Elizabeth Von Arnim

Can our surroundings influence our nature? The classic "The Enchanted April" offers a resounding positive answer.

Lotty, Rose, Caroline and Mrs Fisher are four strangers brought together by the promise of a newspaper advertisement:

"To Those who Appreciate Wistaria and Sunshine.
Small mediaeval Italian Castle on the shores of the Mediterranean to be Let Furnished for the month of April. Necessary servants remain. Z, Box 1000, The Times."

The Londoners suffer from neglect at the hands of their husbands and themselves: While Lotty stifles in the day-to-day duties as a middle-class housewife, Caroline suffocates in the glitter of the jet-set and Rose forces herself into a life of churchgoing piety to atone for the perceived sins of her husband; Mrs Fisher seems to have settled herself among dead friends, gloomily waiting her turn, a true Victorian.

San Salvatore, inundated with fragrant and colourful blooms, with its view of the sea and italian food will change these women forever - in fact, when they finally arrive, it will also change their husbands and lovers.

As the Von Arnim puts it, the castle forces its inhabitants into the opposite of a vicious circle - a virtuous one - where everyone is nice and so everyone feels well, and predisposed to niceties.

I was sad at how Lotty's character, which won me from the first page, seemed to disappear as the action moves to San Salvatore, and yet it makes complete sense. For she in fact dissolves into the italian garden, woods and water, and as soon as she sets foot on the path to the castle is at one with it. It is the other three who will take some time to ripen in the sun and abandon the constraints of politeness, haughtiness and distrust, the various grey London coats in which they hide their fear of life, death and love.

As Lotty puts it in the very beginning:
"What we both need is a holiday."
Indeed.

"Lost & Found" - Jacqueline Sheehan

You're right. It was the cover that did it. But how could anyone resist?

I didn't have high expectations for "Lost & Found". In fact, the sweetness of the cover made me anticipate a watered down novel, targeted at busy women in need of a weekend book.

In fact, Jacqueline Sheehan's was surprisingly profound.

The synopsis might suggest light-lit (of which there is nothing wrong with, per se) but the writer's eye for character detail delivers a lot more.

Rocky is a 38 year-old psychologist who is delivered a terrible blow: her husband dies of a heart attack and she, a trained lifeguard, is unable to revive him through CPR.
Unable to slip quietly into widowhood, she leaves her old life behind and moves to a small island where she takes up a post as animal control warden, not disclosing to anyone her past occupation and tragedy.
Enter a big black lab, with a serious arrow injury and in serious need of a foster home.
Here's where I thought it would get sappy - dog saves girl through undying love etc.
But even though Lloyd the dog ends up saving a lot of characters, Sheehan never gets sickly sweet.
Instead we are treated to a valuable insight into the hearts and minds of the female characters. And between Rocky's panic attacks, her teenage neighbour's anorexia and her older girlfriend's fear of death we get a whole spectrum of women's complicated relationships with themselves, women and men, their bodies and food.
That Sheehan is a psychotherapist can only have helped with these portrayals, which are, to my mind the strong suit of "Lost & Found".
The mystery that surrounds Lloyd's injury, the thriller in which it develops, Rocky's interest in archery, and the fumbling way in which she develops a love interest are also very well achieved - but they are the icing in this very chocolaty, perfect comfort reading with a twist book.

"American Born Chinese" - Gene Luen Yang

Yes, some people didn't grow up ashamed of something - their family, their family's religion, ethnicity, finances, reputation or simple uncoolness. I wonder how they end up building their personalities...must be that well-adjusted frame of mind we hear so much about...

Striving to be like everybody else is every one's childhood dirty little secret - and with adolescence this path usually takes us right down to arrogance and meanness, just like Yang's characters.

A graphic novel that like (or rather, more) than Tintim can be enjoyed by anyone from 7 to 77 years old, and arguably more important, since it portrays a moral lesson we are mostly keen to forget.

The ethics of "American Born Chinese" rang very close to my own, so it was no surprise to find Yang is a catholic. I'm of the lapsed type myself, but hey, dogma dies hard. Still, I believe anyone can enjoy this - we just feel more guilty.


Most of us regain our senses somewhere along the line and develop a sense of pride about our unique background, but Yang's book is remarkable in that it takes the reader so vividly back to those playground/high school days when we just wanted to be like the other blond, blue-eyed, thin and pretty kids.

The only thing that made me sad was realizing this story is happening to some kid right this instant...
Why can't we inject the little monkeys with some age-old wisdom?