MostlyFiction Book Reviews » Real People Fiction We Love to Read! Thu, 25 Jul 2013 14:00:21 +0000 en-US hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5.2 QUEEN OF AMERICA by Luis Alberto Urrea /2011/queen-of-america-by-luis-alberto-urrea/ /2011/queen-of-america-by-luis-alberto-urrea/#comments Wed, 30 Nov 2011 14:11:36 +0000 Judi Clark /?p=22142 Book Quote:

“Who is more of an outlaw than a saint?”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn (NOV 30, 2011)

Like its predecessor, The Hummingbird’s Daughter, Urrea’s sequel, Queen of America is a panoramic, picaresque, sprawling, sweeping novel that dazzles us with epic destiny, perilous twists, and high romance, set primarily in Industrial era America (and six years in the author’s undertaking). Based on Urrea’s real ancestry, this historical fiction combines family folklore with magical realism and Western adventure at the turn of the twentieth century.

It starts where the first book left off, and can be read as a stand-alone, according to the marketing and product description. However, I stoutly recommend that readers read The Hummingbird’s Daughter first. The two stories are part of a heroic saga; you shouldn’t cut off the head to apprehend the tale. You cannot capture the incipient magic and allure of Teresita without her roots in the first (and better) book. Urrea spent twenty years researching his family history, border unrest, guerrilla violence in the post-Civil War southwest, and revolution, so poignantly rendered in his first masterpiece.

At the center of both stories is the enigmatic and beautiful heroine, Teresita Urrea, named the Saint of Cabora by her legion of followers, when at sixteen, she was sexually assaulted, died, and subsequently rose from her coffin at her wake. She was denounced as a heretic by the Catholic Church but declared a saint by her devotees. An accomplished horsewoman and botanical shaman, she discovered the miracle of healing with her hands. Vanquishing pain and suffering with touch, Teresita has embodied her role with dignity, and sometimes despair, as she sacrifices her personal desires in order to combat social injustice and conquer disease.

Solitude is impossible, as she is followed by humble pilgrims and pursued by the Mexican government, greedy henchmen and dangerous lackeys. In the sequel, Teresita continues her journey and evolvement, with the primary question and theme of her life– whether a saint can find her life’s purpose and also fall in love. Along the way, she is entangled in conflicts between celebrity and simplicity, material wealth and spiritual wellbeing. Although she is idolized as a saint, she is, alas, human, with human emotions—such as lust, love, sorrow, pain, temptation. She makes mistakes, and is periodically confused and conflicted. It’s hard to be a saint when you’re made of flesh and blood and hormones.

After the Tomochic rebellion in Mexico in 1891, Teresita Urrea flees to the United States with her aging but ripe swashbuckler father, Tomas, known as Sky Catcher. She experiences romantic and cataclysmic love with an Indian mystic and warrior, eventually causing a serious breach with her father. When events spiral out of control, Teresita’s journey takes her further and further from her homeland.

From Tucson, to El Paso, St. Louis, San Francisco, New York, and places everywhere in-between, this sequel is a journey from poverty and pestilence to an unknown, glittering, bustling, and modern America, a place that offers new opportunities for immigrant Teresita—-prosperity, new romance, and celebrity. She is hunted by assassins, who claim she is the spiritual leader of the Mexican Revolution; harassed by profiteers, who want to arrange a consortium to exploit her healing abilities; and haunted daily by pilgrims everywhere, begging her to cure their ills.

Dickensian in scope, this ribald novel is peopled by the humble and the haughty, the meek and the mighty—pilgrims, prostitutes, yeoman, warriors, cowboys, vaqueros, royalty, revolutionaries, financial exploiters, gamblers, tycoons, corrupt politicians, drunks, rogues, and outlaws. It’s gritty, bawdy, tender, and tumultuous, and sometimes turgid, as it meanders down several long and winding paths. When it stalls at intervals, patience and the love of prose and colorful character will keep the reader fastened. This will appeal to fans of high adventure, mixed with folktale wisdom and mystical fantasy. Big, vast skies and rough and tumble travel, this is an unforgettable story of love, purpose, and redemption.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-5from 4 readers
PUBLISHER: Little, Brown and Company; Import edition (November 28, 2011)
REVIEWER: Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Luis Alberto Urrea
EXTRAS: Excerpt
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The Border Trilogy Memoirs:

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]]> /2011/queen-of-america-by-luis-alberto-urrea/feed/ 0 11/22/63: A NOVEL by Stephen King /2011/112263-a-novel-by-stephen-king/ /2011/112263-a-novel-by-stephen-king/#comments Tue, 08 Nov 2011 13:34:45 +0000 Judi Clark /?p=21953 Book Quote:

“It’s a perfectly balanced mechanism of shouts and echoes pretending to be wheels and cogs, a dreamclock chiming beneath a mystery glass we call life…A universe of horror and loss surrounding a single lighted stage where mortals dance in defiance of the dark.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (NOV 8, 2011)

Dedicated Stephen King fans are in for an epic treat—an odyssey, a Fool’s journey, an adventure with romance. A genre-bending historical novel with moral implications, this story combines echoes of Homer, H.G. Wells, Don Quixote, Quantum Leap (the old TV show), Jack Finney’s Time and Again, and even a spoonful of meta-King himself, the czar of popular fiction.

For King fans, the voice is familiar—the hapless, reluctant, lonely, courageous, romantic, destiny-bound hero/scarred social warrior. The story is King-esque– towering, prophetic, and flamboyant. For non-King readers, this may not chime. It may seem melodramatic, exaggerated, histrionic. But he isn’t attempting to write a deep and complex revisionist history. This is mainstream entertainment; King is King of what King does—the unruly escapist story with a huge and sentimental heart. The “Constant Reader” will approve.

This is not horror, in case you are strictly old school fans. However, there is a touch of the supernatural via time-travel. And there is blood and gore sprayed here and there. If you liked Under the Dome,  you will likely enjoy this one. If you are new to King, and are reading this for more insight into the fateful day of 11/22/63, or a “what would the world be like if…?,” this is not King’s principle design. It hovers, yes, and is material only to the primary theme.

Somewhere in the space-time continuum between preservation and progress is the “obdurate past” and the malleable future. Do we have the moral right to alter history, if we could? This is Jake Epping’s noble journey–to answer that question—and, even more so, to ask it. The thrust of the story centers on Jake and the other fictional characters King created; however, JFK, Lee Harvey Oswald, and other historical characters are an essential backdrop and stimulus to the events that unfold. King’s best nuances illuminate how the past and the present have a harmony that echoes, sings, dances, and shadows.

“It’s all of a piece…It’s an echo so close to perfect you can’t tell which one is the living voice and which is the ghost-voice returning.”

English schoolteacher Jake Epping is introduced to a portal to the past by his friend, Al Templeton, who owns a greasy spoon diner in Lisbon Falls, Maine. Al discovered it years ago, and has made many “trips” back and forth, but he is too sick now to return. The portal brings you to September 9, 1958, 11:58 am. No matter how many days, months, or years you stay, you always return two minutes later on the day you left, 2011 (but you will biologically age).

Jake’s mission is to stay five years, keep tabs on Oswald and uncover the truth of the Kennedy assassination controversy—and, if Oswald acted alone, to stop him. King provides details that make the time-travel plausible—suspending disbelief in that sense is playfully easy. Compounding Jake’s goal is his desire to change other pieces of the past—to change other tragedies, which confronts the prophecy that “the past is obdurate,” those words that he returns to.

Jake assumes the identity of George Amberson, and makes a couple of trial runs before committing to his five-year stay. He eventually lands in the fictional town of Jodie, Texas, a town north of Dallas, where he can earn a living as a teacher, and tail Oswald during his off-hours. It is in Jodie where the moral questions and most of the adventure lodge in the reader’s heart. Jake/George becomes emotionally invested in the people, the town, and one attractive librarian, Sadie Dunhill. Inevitably, his mission and his new life rub together, generating poignant conflicts and urgent demands that threaten to undermine his quest.

King’s strengths include his sense of place and time. He renders 1958 so specifically that you will be transported. Ten-cent root beers with foam; fin-tailed Chevrolets; cigarette smoke wafting inside and out; Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis from the jukebox; dancing cheek-to-cheek; mink stoles and Moxie soda; rotary dial phones and party lines, and so much more to texturize the “Land of Ago.” There’s even a meta-fictional surprise in Derry, where characters from a former novel appear, connecting George with the past’s push on the present. King makes it credible for memories to branch arterially from past to present, for different time periods to cast hazy shadows and intersections on each other. Parallels flourish, coincidences shade.

The novel is both story and character-driven, but there’s no question of the white hats vs. the black hats here. King removes the guesswork, which can be a drawback to discovery. Dialogue is earnestly overstated, motives occasionally simplified, and plot devices conveniently executed, or with a bait-and-switch technique. He isn’t one for much subtlety, justifying (too many) coincidences by cleverly making coincidence part of the theme. But it works, and beneath it all is an enchanting story. The reader cares as passionately as Jake. Sadie, however, is the unforgettable character in this book. Jake/George may be the hero, but Sadie is the spirited touchstone. Comely, fetchingly clumsy, and wounded, she dances off the pages.

Despite the voluminous research done by King into the Oswald controversy, his conclusions are woven into the book rather cursorily, but emphatically. Does this matter? It might, especially to readers who feel that authorial intrusion into the narrative was intemperate. The reader doesn’t have to necessarily agree with a character’s actions, but if a historical context is displayed as fact, but the facts don’t add up for the reader, then it falls apart.

No popular author closes a story like Stephen King. Consummately sublime and serendipitous, he builds deft bridges and ladders that are not only cosmic and mystical, but also fitting and relevant. He captures in a few chapters what an evocative song can capture in a few minutes. Whatever his flaws, his rewards are plentiful. Classy, cosmic, mystical, and kaleidoscopic–it was radiant and clear, through a glass, darkly.

AMAZON READER RATING: from 2250readers
PUBLISHER: Scribner; Original edition (November 8, 2011)
REVIEWER: Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Stephen King
EXTRAS: Excerpt
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*1Takes place in Castle Rock, Maine
*2Takes place in Derry, Maine
*3 Takes place in Little Tall Island, Maine
*P These two books have one “pinhole” vision into each other

The Dark Tower Series

Originally written as Richard Bachman

Co-written with Peter Straub

Non-Fiction:

And the Movies created from his books:

]]> /2011/112263-a-novel-by-stephen-king/feed/ 0 DISASTER WAS MY GOD by Bruce Duffy /2011/disaster-was-my-god-by-bruce-duffy/ /2011/disaster-was-my-god-by-bruce-duffy/#comments Thu, 13 Oct 2011 13:02:16 +0000 Judi Clark /?p=21532 Book Quote:

“Newcomers are free to condemn their ancestors. We are at home and we have the time.” ~ Arthur Rimbaud

Book Review:

Review by Doug Bruns (OCT 13, 2011)

I was in my late thirties when the poet Arthur Rimbaud first crossed my horizon. It was Jim Harrison, the American writer, who brought him to my attention. In his memoir Off to the Side, Harrison writes, “I think that I was nineteen when Rimbaud’s ‘Everything we are taught is false’ became my modus operandi.” Harrison continues, “…Rimbaud’s defiance of society was vaguely criminal and at nineteen you try to determine what you are by what you are against.” I admire Harrison a great deal. If he liked Rimbaud, if Rimbaud was the man, then I needed to know more. I discovered that the poet had influenced a good bit of the music of the ‘60s and 1970s, that Morrison and Dylan and a host of others had cited his authority. Of this time, Patty Smith writes in her recent memoir, Just Kids: “’When I was sixteen, working in a non-union factory in a small South Jersey town,” she writes, “my salvation and respite from my dismal surroundings was a battered copy of Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations, which I kept in my back pocket.” His work, she concludes, “became the bible of my life.”

Further, I discovered that the term infant terrible was essentially coined to describe him and that, not only the writing, but the life lived was breathtaking.

I bought Rimbaud and dug in. But try as I might, he was lost on me. There was no fire there. The revolution was dead. I’d come too late to the poet. To Harrison’s point, to Patty’s point, Rimbaud was a young person’s game. To the mature reader, discovering him for the first time, his genius, well, it is obvious, particularly in the context of history; but he does not speak intimately to the older reader, does not influence to the degree of life changing, at least not to this reader. That the right book must find the reader at the right time, was never more true.

Louis Menand has written that a feature of modernity is that “the reproduction of custom is no longer understood to be one of the chief purposes of existence.” Like all ground-breaking endeavors, a visionary must come along and shatter tradition, setting a new standard and creating something that did not exist previously. In the modern tradition, the past is defined against the new, not incorporated into it. In the arts, in particular, the visionary becomes the genius-hero, an immortal. (“What you are, you are by accident of birth; what I am, I am by myself,” said Beethoven. “There are and will be a thousand princes; there is only one Beethoven.”) Though he did not touch me in a visceral way, Rimbaud nonetheless did not fail to impress. That the poet visionary-genius Rimbaud was a child prodigy, almost unheard of in literature, makes for good copy. (“He was,” writes Mr. Duffy, “that rarest of rarities and oddest of oddities–a prodigy of letters.”) That after producing his art and while still a young man, he renounced his genius and broke with society, fleeing to the African desert, some say running guns, seems a more likely creation of Hollywood than history. But it is history, and a rich history at that. That is the vein Mr. Duffy so deftly mines.

“I called to my executioners to let me bite the ends of their guns, as I died. I called to all plagues to stifle me with sand and blood.
Disaster was my god.”

Disaster was my God is a fictionalized biography of the poet Arthur Rimbaud’s life. The literature resulting from that early life is here too, not as exegesis, but rather as a compliment, an illuminating accent. In a note to the reader, Mr. Duffy explains his intent: “In a life as enigmatic and contradictory as Rimbaud’s, the more I considered the facts, and the many missing facts–and the more I studied his blazingly prescient writings and poems–the more I found it necessary to bend his life in order to see it, much as a prism bends light to release its hidden colors.” The poet’s life lends itself well to this technique. It is a vivid rainbow. Mr. Duffy’s technique succeeds wonderfully.

The outline of his life is nothing short of remarkable. Rimbaud created his ground-breaking art in a five year period, while in his late teens. (Victor Hugo called him “an infant Shakespeare.”) At age sixteen or seventeen, at perhaps the height of his powers, he left his village of Charleville, his middle-class upbringing, his sister and mother, and traveled to Paris, at the invitation of Symbolist poet Paul Verlaine. “Come, dear great soul,” wrote Verlaine. “We await you; we desire you.” The older Verlaine, married and a father, fell under the boy’s spell and the two began a torrid and public affair that scandalized Paris. (It is unclear whether Rimbaud was homosexual, or simply a provocateur–likely the latter.) Eventually the two separated, driving Verlaine to wit’s end, shooting Rimbaud. The young poet is slightly wounded and Verlaine consequently spent two years in prison.

Leaving Paris, Rimbaud began a life of adventure, traveling widely, giving up–even renouncing–his writing. He undertook the life of a businessman and explorer, ending up in sub-Saharan Africa. He was 24 when he settled in Harar, Ethiopia, working as a merchant. In 1891 he developed a problem in his leg which would ultimately force him out of the desert. He was carried across the desert on a gurney, his savings strapped to his chest in a special vest, shotgun at his side, surrounded by hired mercenaries. The leg was amputated in Marseille but the cancer soon spread and he died, in the company of his sister Isabelle, in Marseille at age 37.

“I say that one must be a seer, make oneself a seer. The poet makes himself a seer by a long, prodigious, and rational disordering of all the senses. Every form of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he consumes all the poisons in him, and keeps only their quintessences. This is an unspeakable torture during which he needs all his faith and superhuman strength, and during which he becomes the great patient, the great criminal, the great accursed – and the great learned one! – among men.”

Mr. Duffy has rich material here and he makes the most of it. He builds his narrative on the premise that Rimbaud and his mother Vitalie had a love-hate relationship, a dynamic that spurred in Rimbaud both his creative life and his peripatetic life. Indeed, the letters of Rimbaud to his mother include many suggestions that a great tension did exist. For instance, Rimbaud writes to his mother in December 1882 from Aden, Yemen: “I just sent you a list of books to send me here. Please don’t tell me to go to hell! I am about to reembark into the African continent for several years; and without these books, I will be without a heap of essential information. I will be like a blind man…” Subsequent letters find him pleading with his mother for supplies and support. Mr. Duffy’s premise is largely successful–”It was you, Mother,” he has Rimbaud’s sister say, “you who made him a foreigner in his own home.” The mother opens the book and ends it; she is the impetus, even the muse, of genius–though it is lost on her completely, in Mr. Duffy’s iteration.

Early on, Mr. Duffy asks, “…how a poet prodigy of almost unfathomable abilities could willfully forget how to write. How could such a man disable a style and unlearn ageless rhythms–stubbornly resist, as one might food and water, words and their phantom secrets…..in short, could a poet of genius systematically erase his own life–unwrite it? How? To what conceivable end?” It is a question that cannot be answered. The subject is gone, the analyst’s couch can never reveal the answer. This is where the novelist’s art comes in. Drawing on the life, the history, the writing and a good deal of imagination, Mr. Duffy fills in the gaps. He does it with much enthusiasm and verve. One gets the impression that he truly loves his subject, that he wants in a bad way to reveal a profound secret of this genius. But of course the secrets have all gone to the grave. Hence the art.

Late in the novel, Mr. Duffy puts these words into the mouth of Verlaine: “When Rimbaud was a child, or still a young man, he could believe in his dreams, could pretend, could be seduced by his own make believe. And remember, as Rimbaud saw it, and naive as this might sound, he had not been sent to earth merely to write poems but to change the world–quite literally. He actually thought that, he really did, and for while I suppose I did, too.” They say that a society has no culture until the poets show up. Rimbaud showed up and set culture on it’s ear, creating a new culture out of whole cloth. He did, indeed, change the world. He set a generation upon a new path–and does still. That is the job of the immortals.

“I want to be a poet, and I am working to make myself a seer; you will not understand this, and I don’t know how to explain it to you. It is a question of reaching the unknown by the derangement of all the senses. The sufferings are enormous, but one has to be strong, one has to be born a poet, and I know I am a poet…”

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-5from 5 readers
PUBLISHER: Doubleday (July 19, 2011)
REVIEWER: Doug Bruns
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Wikipedia page on  Bruce Duffy
EXTRAS: Excerpt
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Bibliography:

]]> /2011/disaster-was-my-god-by-bruce-duffy/feed/ 0 THE CAT’S TABLE by Michael Ondaatje /2011/the-cats-table-by-michael-ondaatje/ /2011/the-cats-table-by-michael-ondaatje/#comments Fri, 07 Oct 2011 14:00:11 +0000 Judi Clark /?p=21442 Book Quote:

“Sometimes we find our true and inherent selves during youth. It is a recognition of something that at first is small within us, that we will grow into somehow. My shipboard nickname was MYNAH.  Almost my name but with a step into the air and a glimpse of some extra thing, like a slight swivel in their walk all birds have when they travel by land.”

Book Review:

Review by Friederike Knabe  (OCT 5, 2011)

In his new novel, The Cat’s Table, Michael Ondaatje imagines a young boy’s three-week sea voyage across the oceans, from his home in Colombo, Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) to England. The eleven-year-old travels alone and is, not surprisingly, allocated to the “lowly” Cat’s Table, where he joins an odd assortment of adults and two other boys of similar age.

In the voice of young “Michael,” Ondaatje shares the boys’ adventures on the ship with charming immediacy, while an older, adult “Michael” looks over his shoulder, first hardly noticeable, and later, more and more directly reflecting on his own recollections and moving the story forward. Are we reading a childhood memoir of sorts, a coming-of-age story, a personal journey into the past? Are we reading fact or fiction? Maybe, all of it. The parallels to the author’s life are easily spotted: a childhood in Ceylon, a nineteen fifties journey by ship from there to England… Other parallels to the author’s life come into view in the course of the book. Also, Ondaatje suggests in the first pages: “I try to imagine who the boy on the ship was…” In the Author’s Note (at the end of the book) Ondaatje is as clear and opaque as can be: “Although the novel uses the colouring and locations of memoir and autobiography, The Cat’s Table is fictional – from the Captain and crew and all its passengers on the boat – to the narrator.” Still…

Young Michael and his two new friends, Cassius and Ramadhin, become soon inseparable; yet, their friendship does not extend to sharing much about their backgrounds, so we don’t know more about them either at this point. They freely roam the huge ship, exploring any nook and cranny they can get into, especially during nights. Cassius is the rambunctious, Ramadhin, the cautious, more reasonable one, conscious of his “weak heart.” Michael describes himself as a “follower.”

The men at the Cat’s Table, astutely observed by young Michael, while distinct in personality and behaviour, share, nonetheless, their curiosity for the happenings on the ship – one could call theirs “the gossip table” – and, more importantly, they each provide some kind of “life lesson” for the boys, be it in history, music, literature or biology. The most intriguing passenger at the table, however, is Miss Lasqueti, who appears to have insider knowledge of a very different kind. From time to time, they are joined by seventeen-year-old, beautiful and “mysterious” Emily, a distant cousin of Michael’s. Given her “higher social standing” and her placement in the dining room, she can contribute intriguing news for any evolving “story.” She knows, for example, much about the dangerous, heavily guarded, prisoner, who the boys have noticed during their nighttime adventures. Of course, Emily also has her secret encounters at night, overheard by Michael hiding in a lifeboat…

For the first half or so of the novel, I am simply charmed by the descriptions of the boys’ hilarious or risky escapades on the ship as it moves across the Indian Ocean towards the Suez Canal. We explore the ship’s “world” through a child’s eyes. The episodes, told more like independent vignettes than in a contiguous narrative, succeed, nonetheless, in carrying our curiosity forward: they capture the atmosphere on ship, provide personality capsules of passengers or crew, and details of their various activities. Once closer to land, we are offered glimpses into the varying landscapes and port cities. While Michael’s journey is depicted with gentleness and often lyrical descriptions, something seems to be missing in terms of the story’s overall meaning and depth – at least for me. But soon enough, like entering a new section in the book, the voice of the adult Michael takes on a more prominent role. He drops hints how different episodes or people might be connected; he starts asking questions about the veracity of what we have been told, pondering the reliability of his long-term memory…

And, most engagingly, Ondaatje, while continuing to remain within the overall three-week time span of the journey, now leaves it with ease to reveal aspects of past and future of several of the central characters. These mental excursions – relating to Emily, Miss Lasqueti, Ramadhin, etc. and, last but not least, the prisoner – help us fill in gaps within earlier descriptions of episodes during the voyage. They also add an integrating layer to the narrative that I had been hoping for. Finally, they bring us also closer to the adult Michael. It is only later in life that he realizes the journey’s importance as “a rite of passage;” a journey that formed him in more ways than he has acknowledged for a long time. In hindsight he can give voice to an emotion that he experienced then and many times since as he grew into an adult as “a desire that is a mixture of thrill and vertigo.” Emily, when he meets her again, much later, has the better phrase for what affected them: “We all became adults before we were adults.”

In the end, it does not matter anymore – at least to me – whether this book is a novel or a memoir/autobiography. It is a beautifully rendered story of growing up and living with the memories of youth. The novel’s language, the tone, the images and the tender approach to his subject suggest that this is probably Ondaatje’s most personal and intimate novel in many years.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-5from 46 readers
PUBLISHER: Knopf (October 4, 2011)
REVIEWER: Friederike Knabe
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Wikipedia page on Michael Ondaatje
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh

Star of the Sea by Joseph O’Connor

Bibliography:

Nonfiction:

Poetry:

Movies from books:

]]> /2011/the-cats-table-by-michael-ondaatje/feed/ 0 BOXER, BEETLE by Ned Beauman /2011/boxer-beetle-by-ned-beauman/ /2011/boxer-beetle-by-ned-beauman/#comments Tue, 13 Sep 2011 12:56:54 +0000 Judi Clark /?p=19879 Book Quote:

“Normally you can’t get a proper look at your own conscience because it only ever comes out to gash you with its beak and you just want to do whatever you can to push it away; but put your conscience in the cage of this paradox, where it can slither and bark but it can’t hurt you, and you can study it for as long as you wish. Most people don’t truly know how they feel about the Holocaust because they’re worried that if they think about it too hard, they’ll find out they don’t feel sad enough about the 6 million dead, but I’m an expert in my own soul.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  SEP 13, 2011)

First-time author Ned Beauman really lays it out there in the first chapter of this extraordinary novel, which begins with an imaginary surprise birthday party thrown by Hitler for Joseph Goebbels in 1940. It is an exhilarating, outrageous opening to a book that will in fact take a quite different course. But it is important as a way of establishing the moral parameters (and this IS a moral book) and freeing up an imaginative space in which Beauman can explore some ideas that are normally unapproachable.

Actually, Beauman reminds me of nobody so much as Evelyn Waugh. He writes about the same period (England in the 1930s), he inhabits some of the same milieux (a house party in some noble pile), he shares or even tops Waugh in his outrageous use of absurd humor, and he writes about serious subjects at heart. His debut novel explores the world of British Fascism in the years before WWII. Despite the opening, the German Nazis never make an appearance other than as tutelary deities. In its place is a gaggle of mostly well-connected amateurs, a sort of lunatic fringe of the upper class, pursuing theories of eugenics and a universal world language. Yes, they had their real-life counterparts; Lord Claramore’s family is in the book, the Erskines, somewhat resembles the Mitfords; Evelyn Erskine, the daughter who shows her independence by becoming an atonal composer, is virtually identical to Elizabeth Lutyens; and Sir Oswald Mosley, the real-life leader of the British Union of Fascists, makes a cameo appearance, but his 1936 march of supremacy through the largely-Jewish London East End is shown as the farcical debacle it really was.

This period background is viewed from a modern frame. Kevin Broom, the narrator and a collector of Nazi memorabilia, gets caught up in a rivalry which leaves two other collectors dead and Kevin himself in danger of his life. The goal of the rivalry is not at first clear, but it turns upon a letter from Hitler to British scientist Philip Erskine thanking him for an unusual gift, and some as-yet-unspecified connection between Erskine and a diminutive London Jewish boxer named “Sinner” Roach.

Do not look to the story for any great plausibility, though. It propels the plot with exhilarating efficiency, but it is more in tune with the popular adventure stories of the earlier part of the century than with modern expectations of verisimilitude; Kevin’s role model, for instance, is Batman. Waugh used such devices also, but Beauman is very much of his own time in translating Waugh’s absurdity into shock or even disgust. Kevin, for instance, has trimethylaminuria, a genetic disease that makes his bodily secretions smell of rotting fish; there is also strong undercurrent of homosexual violence, which may turn some readers off the book.

Which would be a pity, because the best parts are very good indeed. I am thinking especially of a dinner conversation in New York involving Sinner, two Rabbis, and an American architect, showing how easily some humanitarian endeavors such as mid-century town planning may be perverted into crypto-fascism. Or a brilliant discursion on the quest for a universal language that would unite mankind, discussing real attempts such as Esperanto and Volapük together with the fictional Pangaean, invented by an Erskine ancestor. Or Philip Erskine’s own work with beetles, breeding them for extraordinary aggression and strength, an obvious parallel to the human Eugenics programs of the Nazis for the enhancement the Master Race — though the principle had earlier advocates in both Britain and America. This is a valuable and serious subject for a novelist (it is also examined in Simon Mawer’s excellent Mendel’s Dwarf), and though Beauman chooses an absurd and at times offensive vehicle in which to present it, his obvious intelligence and meticulous linking of his story to real events makes this a far better book than a mere summary might suggest.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-3-5from 33 readers
PUBLISHER: Bloomsbury USA (September 13, 2011)
REVIEWER: Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Ned Beauman blog  and website
EXTRAS: Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

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]]> /2011/boxer-beetle-by-ned-beauman/feed/ 0 THE TWELFTH ENCHANTMENT by David Liss /2011/the-twelfth-enchantment-by-david-liss/ /2011/the-twelfth-enchantment-by-david-liss/#comments Fri, 26 Aug 2011 13:47:23 +0000 Judi Clark /?p=20422 Book Quote:

“I know that changes are coming, and we must be ready to face them. Dark and terrible things, things such as what you saw with Lord Byron and at the mill, but those things are … minor disturbances, harbingers of beings much more dangerous.”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowsky  AUG 26, 2011)

The Twelfth Enchantment, by David Liss, starts off promisingly. It is the early nineteenth century and our heroine, Lucy Derrick, is a twenty-year-old orphan who is living unhappily in Nottingham, England, with her cruel uncle and an abusive woman named Mrs. Quince. Although she was well-educated by her late father, Lucy was left almost penniless when he died. She is at the mercy of her vicious uncle, Richard Lowell, who cannot wait to be rid of her. In fact, her uncle plans to give her hand in marriage to a thirty-five year old, dried up prune of a man named Olson, the owner of a local hosiery mill.

Although the Industrial Revolution has brought prosperity to some, this newfound wealth and efficiency has come at a high price. Smokestacks belch thick and toxic fumes that pollute the areas bordering the factories. In addition, manual laborers have been replaced by machinery, leading to high unemployment and abject poverty for those who can no longer feed their families. Furthermore, conditions in the factories are vile and unsafe; even the children who work the looms are beaten when they do not meet their overseer’s expectations.

Lucy’s existence is upended by a series of strange events involving Lord Byron (he shows up often in historical fiction these days), a roué named Mr. Morrison who tarnished Lucy’s reputation when she was just sixteen, an avuncular William Blake, and a mysterious and beautiful stranger, Mary Crawford, who introduces Lucy to a world of spells. It seems that Lucy has uncanny abilities that, if harnessed properly, would give her enormous power. She will need to master a huge amount of arcane knowledge and show tremendous courage, for she will find herself pitted against mighty and evil forces.

Meanwhile, Lucy must decide whether to fend off Byron’s not entirely unwelcome attentions (she admits that he is gorgeous to look at but a thorough reprobate). Lucy has a great deal on her plate: Whom can she really trust? Does she have the intellect and determination to use her unique talent effectively? Will she ever meet the love of her life?

By now, you may have deduced that Liss has overstuffed his narrative. There is a derivative quality to this novel that brings to mind familiar (and better) works, such as: Jane Eyre, who was cast off without a penny but stood up for herself as a proud, moral, and independent woman; Hard Times, in which Charles Dickens decries the forced labor of children and excoriates those who would enrich themselves on the backs of the poor; and the Harry Potter series, in which J. K. Rowling breathes life into magic and wizardry, while also dealing with feelings, relationships, and social issues. Liss often writes lush sentences, is a skilled descriptive writer, and he imbues Lucy with warmth and spirit. It is really too bad that, as the book progresses, the author resorts to clichés, contrivances, and silly twists and turns. The conclusion is flat and anticlimactic, when it should have been exciting and exhilarating. Much of The Twelfth Enchantment is captivating, but the weak conclusion may leave readers less than spellbound.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-3-5from 47 readers
PUBLISHER: Random House; First Edition edition (August 9, 2011)
REVIEWER: Eleanor Bukowsky
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: David Liss
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

See also:

Bibliography:

Benjamin Weaver thrillers:

Other Historical novels:

]]> /2011/the-twelfth-enchantment-by-david-liss/feed/ 0 THE DAYS OF THE KING by Filip Florian /2011/the-days-of-the-king-by-filip-florian/ /2011/the-days-of-the-king-by-filip-florian/#comments Wed, 17 Aug 2011 13:05:57 +0000 Judi Clark /?p=20130 Book Quote:

“Having burnt their lips and their peace of mind on a soup of Brussels sprouts, the four – General Nicolae Golescu, minister of the interior and of foreign affairs under Bibescu Voda, member of the 1848 revolutionary committee, the provisional government, and the first Princely Lieutenancy; Lascar Catargiu, with his wolflike senses, honed until then only in appointments as prefect and en famille; Colonel Nicolae Haralamb, landowner, son of a court victualler from Craiova; and Ion Ghika, bizarre Turkophile revolutionary of 1848, longtime Bey of Samos – were now so prudent that they would have blown even on a bowl of yoghurt before tasting it.”

Book Review:

Review by Vesna McMaster  AUG 16, 2011)

It’s 1886, and the dentist Joseph Strauss follows Karl Ludwig of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen from Prussia to Bucharest, where the latter is crowned King Carol I of Romania. Carol’s relationship with Joseph strays beyond the dental boundaries and they develop a certain camaraderie, particularly when Joseph arranges for the services of a blind prostitute to be made available (in strictest secret) to the politically beleaguered king. It is precisely the intimate nature of the knowledge Joseph carries which eventually leads to the king’s deliberate distancing of himself from the dentist. However, when the three-year-old Princess Maria dies of scarlet fever, and no further heirs seem forthcoming, Joseph wonders whether the King ought to be informed that the blind whore now has a son with a suspiciously aristocratic nose.

Filip Florian is a highly regarded Romanian author, and his first novel, Little Fingers  won numerous awards.

Now, how can I put this. I have an off-hand familiarity with the Continental predilection for convoluted language in both fiction and non-fiction. The ability to twist thirteen sentences into one contortionist-like knot and still somehow come out grammatically on top is often regarded as a sign of intellectual and linguistic brilliance. It’s little wonder in that case that Florian’s work has won high regard.

Sentences in this novel are frequently one and a half pages long (well, on Kindle at least). Subject is violently sundered from object, blown apart by sub-structures and interjections to make the reader’s mind dark with confusion. Why use one adjective when you could use twenty three, interspersed with thirteen sub-clauses and twelve asides? There is certainly nothing wrong with the translator’s (and I suspect Florian’s) grammar or vocabulary. After parsing the first two sentences out, though, I found it far too wearisome to follow the exact meaning of the text, and had to rely on intuition and guessing to struggle on, or risk going mad.

One advantage to these verbal acrobatics was, admittedly, the revival of several infrequently-used adjectives. It was refreshing to see some of the recesses of the rich English language being taken out and dusted off: I hadn’t used “nacreous” in quite a while and as for “canicular,” never. (“Having the quality of mother-of-pearl” and, in this application, “referring to the dog-days” respectively, in case you were wondering.)

The off-putting garb of tortured sentence structure which Florian of necessity wears is, however, doubly unfortunate because there is a highly talented writer lurking under there. Somewhere. It’s noticeable when the narrative narrows down to a point of excitement, or when rapid action takes place. He can’t help allowing sentences out in short breaths, and suddenly the scene springs to life. The characters start gasping for breath, their gags and restraints momentarily loosened. Unfortunately the action inevitably comes to an end. Then it’s time for either narrative, or asides, or observations and descriptions – all of which would be interesting and vivid were they cut up and served decently rather than being thrown at one’s face like a giant custard tart. Techniques of delivering backstory through dialogue or implication are obviously frowned on in Romania.

Much as I’d like to, I can’t say I would recommend this book to anyone who doesn’t know the sort of things Continental writing can get up to in its spare time. I am left wondering whether Florian will consider aiming his writing more at an English-speaking audience, but I’d guess that’s (sadly) unlikely. It’s a bit much to ask a nation to change its accepted linguistic style so that we can enjoy a few more decent translations. In the meantime poor Mr Florian might be doomed to languish in the obscure corners of the English translation pond.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-3-0from 1 readers
PUBLISHER: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1 edition (August 16, 2011)
REVIEWER: Vesna McMaster
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Filip Florian
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

Bibliography:

]]> /2011/the-days-of-the-king-by-filip-florian/feed/ 0 THE STORM AT THE DOOR by Stefan Merrill Block /2011/the-storm-at-the-door-by-stefan-merrill-block/ /2011/the-storm-at-the-door-by-stefan-merrill-block/#comments Fri, 01 Jul 2011 13:40:26 +0000 Judi Clark /?p=18934 Book Quote:

“She knows that she does not believe – not really – the stories she tells of Frederick. She knows she does not believe – not really – the opinions of Frederick’s psychiatrists, her relatives, her own family. She knows that she still does not believe that it is as simple as others tell her it ought to be, as she tells herself it ought to be: that she was sane, while Frederick was mad; that she performed the heroic necessary work of saving her family, while, in his mental hospital, Frederick ‘indulged in the escapist writing behavior’ (his psychiatrist’s words) that is now in Katharine’s hands. Sane mad, heroic, dissolute, earnest, deluded: she knows she does not believe – not really – in those simple divisions into which she has spent the last twenty years organizing her past.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (JUL 1, 2011)

Stefan Merrill Block has written a novel so irrepressibly beautiful and poetic that it left me stunned. The Storm at the Door is based on the life of his grandparents, Frederick and Katharine. Partly imagined and partly based on fact, this is the story of a troubled family dealing with mental illness, secrets, and denial. It is also about the horror and the power of a psychiatric hospital, along with the myriad patients who have enacted their trust in this institution.

Frederick and Katharine met on the cusp of World War II and were married six months later. Theirs was a love affair based mostly on correspondence and the desperation of wartime. For some unknown reason, Frederick does not finish out his service and is placed in a naval hospital. When he is released he looks like a victim of starvation. The reasons for these events are never truly clear to Katharine.

Frederick is charismatic and the life of the party. He is also rowdy and loves his bourbon. He begins to be unfaithful to Katharine early on in their marriage. He disappears for days at a time and comes home promising to change and be a better man and husband. He has lots of plans and aspirations, none of which seem to come to fruition. He cannot hold down a job for long although he has an MBA from Harvard. When he drinks, which he seems to do to self-medicate, he is inappropriate but he is usually able to steer clear of getting into all-out trouble. Katharine’s goal in life is to please others and she constantly and consistently forgives Frederick his transgressions.

One auspicious evening in 1962, Frederick drinks at least five bourbons and leaves the party they are at, borrowing a friend’s raincoat. He is naked underneath. He walks up to the nearest road and flashes either his rump or his genitals to oncoming traffic. Most of the cars just peer and go on. However, two old ladies call the police and Frederick is handcuffed and taken to jail. He has the option of prison or entering a psychiatric hospital. Katharine, with the help of her friends and relatives, decides to commit him to Mayflower Hospital , a fictional hospital based on the actual McClean Hospital in Massachusetts. McClean has been a temporary shelter for the poet Robert Lowell, singer James Taylor, and mathematician John Nash. It is supposedly the best psychiatric hospital in the country. What Katharine and Frederick don’t realize, however, is that Frederick’s hospitalization is not strictly voluntary. He is to remain at Mayflower until the chief psychiatrist sees fit to release him.

When Frederick first enters the hospital, it is very laid back and the patients have privileges and room to move – physically and psychically. There are cows in the pasture and the setting is idyllic, designed by the great architect Frederick Law Olmsted on 65 beautiful acres. Frederick has been diagnosed with manic depression and the diagnosis appears to be quite accurate.

The stories of different patients are shared with the reader. There is Robert Lowell. the poet, who suffers from manic depression. There is Professor Shultz, the Harvard linguist who hears sounds in the words he reads, whose life of loss and tragedy most likely contributed to his first psychotic break as well as his subsequent ones. There is Marvin, the most famous patient at Mayflower, a man of 15 distinct personalities ranging from a French poet to Carmen Miranda. There is James Marshall, a war veteran with only one limb (and not all his limbs were lost in the war) who can fold the U.S. flag with his one remaining arm, raise it on the flag pole daily and take it down lovingly every night to refold.

Unfortunately, the administration of the hospital changes and a psychiatrist with little empathy and a desire for complete control takes the helm. During group therapy, he delights in bringing up painful aspects of each patient’s illness and they cringe in the mandated group therapy with him. He betrays each and every one of them in some great way.

The novel is told in alternating viewpoints; one chapter from Katharine’s and the other from Frederick’s. The structure works well. We understand what Frederick is going through in the desperate situation of his hospitalization, which goes on for months. He struggles with multiple solitary confinements and ECT (electric shock) treatments. We also see how hard it is for Katharine to sustain her family as a single parent and to maintain the strength she knows that she needs to have in order to find herself. She is gaining insight on codependency and sees that her desire to please helps everyone but herself.

All of the characters are given great depth. The patients, and the extent of their illnesses, is poetically described. Block gets mental illness, both the beauty and despair that go along with it. His poetic imagery and narrative never falter and the beauty of the book is sustained until the end. This is by far one of the best books I have read in the last ten years. It is a phenomenal feat of love and writing.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-5from 13 readers
PUBLISHER: Random House (June 21, 2011)
REVIEWER: Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Stefan Merrill Block
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of: 

The Quickening Maze by Adam Foulds

Lowboy by John Wray

Bibliography:

 

]]> /2011/the-storm-at-the-door-by-stefan-merrill-block/feed/ 0 THE DANTE CLUB by Matthew Pearl /2011/the-dante-club-by-matthew-pearl/ /2011/the-dante-club-by-matthew-pearl/#comments Thu, 30 Jun 2011 20:51:54 +0000 Judi Clark /?p=18937 Book Quote:

“I’m afraid, Doctor, that while Mr. Fields knows what people read, he shall never quite understand why.”

Book Review:

Review by Vesna McMaster  (JUN 30, 2011)

You could classify The Dante Club loosely as historical fiction. Or perhaps, try historical-fantasy-fiction-literary-murder-mystery. It’s definitely a work to be enjoyed by “literary types,” but also by thrill-seekers, detective buffs, psychological and social analysts and in fact anyone who enjoys a good read.

The setting is Boston in 1865, the main protagonists include the real-life characters of a group of poets. At the time of the action they are unified by the project of translating into English (for the first time in America) Inferno by Dante. They include Oliver Wendell Holmes (poet, author and medical doctor), J.T. Fields (notable publisher), James Russell Lowell (poet, professor and editor), George Washington Green (historian and minister), and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (poet). When a series of spectacularly grisly murders hit the sleepy crime scene in Boston, they start to become aware that the crimes are copy-cat renderings of some of the punishments meted out to sinners in the very Inferno they are working on. As only a handful of people have any knowledge of the work in question, the list of suspects is effectively pared down to members of the club, and a few others. Rumbling in the background are the after-shocks and repercussions of the recent Civil War.

Already, some readers have probably been put off by the list of heavy-duty literary characters. They shouldn’t be. You don’t need to know anything about the protagonists further than what is given to you on the page, and their personalities are not only lively but jumping out of the book with individuality. As a murder mystery the piece is perfectly balanced. The focus of possibility of guilt moves continually, silently – the reader is never left idle for speculation. The action is vivid, the murders horrific and bizarre. There are no spurious red-herrings thrown in for the sake of it. The denouement is thoroughly satisfying in every way.

The rounded sub-plots are almost all instrumental to the dual purpose of further fleshing out the characters and in revolving the possible finger or guilt. Holmes’s fear of loss of literary fame and his lack of empathy with his son, Longfellow’s grief for the loss of his wife, Lowell’s embattlement with the Harvard authorities over the validity of teaching Dante (and modern language works in general), as well as his suicidal tendencies. Patrolman Rey (Boston’s first Black police officer) and his difficulties as a figure of authority in a racially divided society, and Augustus Manning’s maniacal obsession of bringing the University and press under his control. They are all brought together in an extremely solid framework where the reader will step firmly, even if the territory is unfamiliar.

But what relevance, I hear a myriad silent voices quizzing, are either Boston in the 1860s or the works of a 14th century poet? The core thread to both the Boston story and Pearl’s central theme lies in the work of the Inferno itself.

It is an undisputable fact that everyone who has the slightest knowledge of Inferno finds it at the very least memorable – probably on a level they don’t even realise. And Inferno is exceedingly well known. My own most vivid recollections of other works derivative of Dante’s Hell are the 1995 film “Se7en” and the 2005 TV drama “Messiah: the Harrowing,” but the briefest search on Wiki for “Dante and his Divine Comedy in Popular Culture” throws up page after page of references. Dante has made his way into the TV series “Angel” and into “Futurama.” He’s in video games, art and sculpture, music – and of course, literature. In this sense, The Dante Club is not in the least an esoteric book.

Why are we so fond of Dante? Certainly, the punishments in Inferno are grim, and there is no age throughout history in which we have not derived a macabre thrill from pure and bloody spectacle. This is not the cause of its popularity. If it were, we would all be reading torture accounts from the Spanish Inquisition instead. The appeal is in the precise reason it was written: a yearning for justice. Any class or race of human has an inbuilt auto-response system to the myriad of inevitable injustices, great or small, to themselves or to others. “That’s not fair!” is often chased fast by the thought “This is how it should be.” It is the meting out of punishments in an appropriate way (Dante’s contrapasso) that is irresistible to the human psyche. And it is precisely this that is Pearl’s theme. The series of murders are for a long period incomprehensible, but through the key of Dante they are shown to be composed from an almost autistically accurate logic. It is perhaps no coincidence that after graduating from Harvard in English and American Literature, Pearl went straight on to take a Law degree at Yale Law School.

There are some disconcerting aspects to the book. These mainly stem from the dichotomy between extremely well-researched, knowledgeable, fact-based fiction on the one hand and the occasional (but crucial) forgery here and there. It throws the reader off balance a little. Pearl knows his literary characters very well, and their behaviour rings true to what one would expect. The scene is Boston is extremely convincing and is no doubt based on intimate knowledge of the place and its history. However, the notion of the characters in question being involved in this type of criminal investigation is nothing short of preposterous, and the concepts of applied psychology and forensic logic which are brought to play are completely anachronistic. We are left teetering a little at the realisation that the writer is assuming we don’t need to be told what’s fact and what’s fiction: we’re grown-ups and understand that we’re listening to a story that simply uses these vehicles.

So far, we’ve established that it’s a good story, relevant to today, and accessible to a non-literary audience. Now for the caveat. You will enjoy this book ten times more if you are familiar with Inferno on some reasonably detailed textual level. The greatest strength of The Dante Club is the incredible interweaving of the plot on both the levels of the Boston scene and Dante’s exiled imaginings. Quite a number of reviews state that the book “starts off slowly” – this despite the first murder being mentioned on page 1, the first maggoty corpse discovered on page 8, and the first suicide leaping to a gory death on page 28. What they mean is, you don’t understand what’s going on for a good while. This is true, on a plot level. On a metatextual level, the plot is progressing at breakneck speed. The skill and accuracy of quotations and resonances between the two works, within the framework of immaculate modern prose, is the true delight of this novel.

This facet of Pearl’s craft reaches a jaw-dropping peak in a passage late on in the work. The poet-investigators chase after one of the “printer’s devils” in the dead of winter, across a frozen lake. The scene of Lowell grabbing the nearly-submerged “devil” by his curly red locks and demanding explanation brings the 9th circle of hell possibly more vividly to life than Dante did himself, as it is a palimpsest of not only several related scenes in Inferno but the Boston scene as well. The union of all the references and implications in the context of the narrative left me frankly queasy with admiration. Pearl has tried to disambiguate by introducing this particular point in Dante’s narrative just before the incident (there is, literally, a lecture on it), and it is followed up shortly after by another, even plainer rendering on the same theme. Hopefully non-Danteans will pick up on the superficial reference, but I fear a great deal of the force of the words will melt unless aided by a little more knowledge. Pearl himself is a kind of opposite to Patrolman Rey, who hears a piece of Dante quoted to him but cannot understand it, only endure the apprehension of knowing its grave importance. “He remembered the whisperer’s grip stretch across his skull. He could hear the words form so distinctly, but was without the power to repeat any of them.” Pearl by contrast cannot help but repeat them, through the medium of his story.

This extreme marriage between the two texts, or rather the bond between Pearl himself and the text of the Comedia (for his work on which he won the 1998 Dante Prize from the Dante Society of America) is perhaps more apparent than even the author realises. Pearl’s prose is without exception polished, educated and perfectly presented. However it is always in the scenes that refer (in whatever way) back to Dante that are extraordinary in their skill. If you don’t know your Dante, it’s a very accurate way of guessing which parts are alluding to Inferno. If you read a sentence and think “wow that’s vivid” or “what a strange way to put things” – it’s probably echoing Dante. This is not in any way to belittle Pearl’s own words or to suggest excessive reliance on another work. It is merely very evident that the true inspiration for the work are the words of Dante, and it is these that ignite Pearl’s own words as if suddenly doused in petrol when they hit the page with the force of his empathy.

For anyone unfamiliar with Inferno, here are some brief pointers (much more is explained within the book). Dante is journeying through Hell on a sort of tourist visa, and passes through the ante-hell and nine circles of it, which are arranged according to the punishments awarded various types of sinners. The outer circles are for lesser sins, the ninth circle is reserved for traitors and Satan himself, along with Judas Iscariot. In The Dante Club, by a certain arbitrary process only some of the circles are dealt with. Unfortunately, detailing the sins and their punishments here would only spoil (both) books for the reader. It will have to suffice to compare yet another Dante-related work: Milton’s Paradise Lost. If Milton tries to “justify the ways of God to Man,” and Dante might be said on some level to justify the ways of Man to God, Pearl is perhaps trying to justify the ways of Man to Man. The question: what can turn decent people into unspeakable torturers, is one that is as pertinent to this day as it was in the 14th century, and will continue to be so long after we are gone.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-3-5from 362 readers
PUBLISHER: Ballantine Books; Reprint edition (June 27, 2006)
REVIEWER: Vesna McMaster
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Matthew Pearl
EXTRAS: Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

Bibliography:

Related:

]]> /2011/the-dante-club-by-matthew-pearl/feed/ 1 DOC by MARY DORIA RUSSELL /2011/doc-by-mary-doria-russell/ /2011/doc-by-mary-doria-russell/#comments Tue, 24 May 2011 13:38:52 +0000 Judi Clark /?p=18160 Book Quote:

“Things happened. He reacted. Sometimes he took a rebellious pride in the cold-blooded courage of certain unconsidered deeds; just as often, he repented of his rashness afterward. There is, for example, nothing quite like lying in a widening pool of your own blood to make you reconsider the wisdom of challenging bad-tempered men with easy access to firearms.”

Book Review:

Review by Kirsten Merrihew  (MAY 24, 2011)

Doc relates how it might have been during 1878-79 when Dr. John Henry Holliday lived in Dodge City, Kansas. “The Deadly Dentist” who later gained fame or infamy, depending on perspective, for “pistoleering” along with the surviving Earp brothers at the O.K. Corral, saved Wyatt Earp’s life in Dodge first. Earp is said to have credited Holliday with saving him, but apparently didn’t share details, so history isn’t sure of the facts. But this novel presents its own story of how it might have happened.

While in Dodge, Holliday also met “Big Nose Kate,” who would become his common law wife. As for earning a living, his ability to practice his profession was limited by the chronic, wracking cough of his consumption (tuberculosis) — few wanted their faces so close to his, but Doc imagines scenes in which Holliday gets Wyatt into his chair and fixes the other man’s supposedly marred smile for him. To afford his fancy clothes, a long residence in the best rooms of the local hotel, and additional high-spending habits, Doc (as he told folks to call him) dealt faro and took part in other high-stakes card games at night. He’d come West from his native Georgia in hopes that the drier air would improve his lungs, but the dust irritated them further and he drank bourbon in large quantities to “calm” his coughing, often imbibing to drunken unpredictability. A cultured Southern gentleman by upbringing, Doc allowed the coarseness of the West to shape his habits to a degree, developing even before he arrived in Dodge, a shady reputation. But he also retained an appreciation for literature and music, and this novel portrays him as a man concerned with justice for all, even a Chinese…and young black man whose suspicious death Doc was determined to lay on someone’s moral account.

Author Mary Doria Russell, best known so far for her philosophical science fiction hit, The Sparrow, uses her prodigious talents for clear and sometimes very beautiful prose to speculate on a very different subject, but just as she brought readers into Father Emilio Sandoz’s reality, she now brings us into Doc Holliday’s happenstance. Clearly, Russell would like to dispel some of Doc’s outlaw reputation, for she writes on the first page of the first chapter,

“At thirty, he would be famous for his part in the gunfight at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona. A year later, he would become infamous when he rode at Wyatt Earp’s side to avenge the murder of Wyatt’s younger brother Morgan. To sell newspapers, the journalists of his day embellished thin facts with fat rumor and rank fiction; it was they who invented the iconic frontier gambler and gunman Doc Holliday. (Thin. Mustachioed. A cold and casual killer. Doomed and always dressed in black as though for his own funeral).”

As though to balance the scales, Russell’s story quotes a hotel bellhop in Glenwood Springs where Doc Holliday died in November, 1887 at age 36: “We all liked him. He bore his illness with fortitude, and he was grateful for the slightest kindness. Doc was a very fine gentleman, and he was generous when he tipped.”

In her concluding Author’s Note, Russell takes on the obvious question: “Arriving at the end of historical fiction today, the modern reader is likely to wonder, ‘How much of that was real?’ In this case, the answer is not all of it but a lot more than you might think.” That sounds reassuring. However, the fact is that Doc begins Holliday’s life by proposing an historically questioned premise, namely that he was born with a cleft palate and that his physician uncle repaired the outer damage when John Henry was only two months old. Some historians insist that such an operation successfully concluded at such a tender age would have made medical journals. However, no record can be found, so they doubt the veracity of the claim. Some even doubt that Doc ever had a cleft palate at all because pictures of him as an adult, sans moustache, don’t reveal an upper lip scar. So, one can wonder whether Russell decided to use disputed biographical “facts” in order to create more sympathy for the man or to at least portray him with one more strike against him than he actually overcame when she writes he learned to speak properly despite the unrepaired split palate inside his mouth.

For its own reasons, Doc also may have misrepresented Holliday’s long-term but intermittent lover, Mary Katherine Harony ( aka “Kate Elder” or “Big Nose Kate”) as a prostitute. According to some historians, there is no real proof that Harony was. Perhaps, she might have been mistaken for another hooker Kate in town. Or, she could have been cat house madam without herself servicing the customers. Or, she may have been a working girl for a time and then given it up. No one seems certain. Perhaps Russell chooses to make her an “independent” prostitute even during her up/down relationship with Doc to, in part, illustrate further the egalitarian side of Holliday that the author also brings out in other ways. Regardless, this novel seeks to portray the “seedy” sex trade of the West in a softer light, expressing a sense of empathy for the women who made their way in life by selling their bodies (after all, few other opportunities were open to unmarried women out West). The reader gets to understand Russell’s version of Kate and see why she vacillated between Doc and other men. One reason is that Doc couldn’t hold onto his earnings, and Kate felt the need to have her own stream of income. Whatever the truth, Russell shows a Kate who kept coming back to Doc:

“…She knew how to calm him after the dream, how to steady him while he coughed until his throat was raw and his chest burned. She knew how much bourbon was enough to help him catch his breath, and she knew how to make him forget, for a time, his mother’s illness and his own.

“Afterward, she always asked, ‘I’m a good woman to you, ain’t I, Doc?’ He always agreed. When he fell asleep again, she felt the satisfaction of a job well done.”

Doc isn’t just about Holliday and Kate (who, it must be included, like Holliday, was educated in the classics and languages, and that may have been her greatest attraction for the dentist/gambler/gunfighter — she could stimulate his mind too). The novel provides an overview of many of the residents of Dodge: the lawmen, the politicians, the men of commerce, the non-whites, a few Jesuits, the women, the toll gate family, the horses, etc., giving the reader a peek into this rough-and-tumble western town. This fictive recreation is a strong point of the book as we see the complex social, economic, and political pressures that made law and order elusive and justice raw and hard.

The other strength is the novel’s humanizing of Doc Holliday. Although, as mentioned, history can’t provide us with material to back up all of Russell’s contentions, still it is fascinating to see the seemingly contradictory character she presents: a man who stubbornly struggled against his lung disease for 15 years before finally being overcome, a man who didn’t usually start gun fights but would finish them, a man who played heavenly music on pianos when they were tuned correctly, a thoughtful man concerned with justice, a man who was fast with a gun.

However, the novel’s concentration on Doc’s time in Dodge also has its downside. The reader should not expect any in-depth retelling of the Tombstone confrontation or Doc’s subsequent ride by Wyatt Earp’s side. Russell deals with the early and later parts of Holliday’s life in quick packages at the beginning and end of the book, and the bulk of the narrative tends to get a little repetitive as Doc went about his gambling, coughing, a dab of dentistry, fighting with Kate, etc. There is some plot, but arguably there could have been more had Russell permitted herself to begin in earnest in Dodge and then move on to Tombstone and beyond.

Doc is a novel I’ll remember because it describes the Wild West and its survivalist mentality while also illuminating the civilized, decent motivations and actions that those who came to live there brought with them and did not surrender. Violence by nature and man was a fact of life, but human kindness, honor, and sacrifice shone through too. Doc Holliday was a suffering man who adapted somewhat awkwardly to the West, but he did retain some of the gentlemanly, cultural roots his mother had instilled in him. Russell’s Doc is a product of her imagination, but the author may have come closer to his true self than others — biographers, filmmakers, novelists — have.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-5from 107 readers
PUBLISHER: Random House; First Edition edition (May 3, 2011)
REVIEWER: Kirstin Merrihew
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Mary Doria Russell
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:Dreamers of the DayAnd another Western character reimagined in fiction:

Etta by Gerald Kolpan

Bibliography:

Sci-Fi:

Historial:

Murder Mystery:

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