“David’s little voice arose beside the camphor tree, his Yiddish words filled that tropical night, his Jewish song enfolded the forest and enfolded me, little Raj. His voice was so serene, the words flowed naturally, and this recital entered into me and reached my heart, making me at one with the world around me, as if, until then, I had been a stranger to it. The lament seemed to enhance the beauty of the natural world and, if I may dare say it, amid these recollections, amid these terrible and barbaric events, I felt as if this lament spoke of the beauty of life itself. Even though I did not understand a single word of it, the tears rose in my eyes and, more than everything, more that those days spent together, more than our escapade itself, it was this moment that tied forever the knot that bound us together.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (APR 14, 2011)

Usually I review books shortly after reading them. However, Nathacha Appanah’s book, The Last Brother, sat so deeply in my heart that I had to wait several days before reviewing it. I needed it to come closer to the surface, closer to that word place where emotions can be translated into language.

Nathacha Appanah is a French-Mauritian of Indian origin, born in Maruitius and now living in France. The Last Brother won the Prix de la FNAC 2007 and the Grand Prix des lecteurs de L’Express 2008. Geoffrey Strachan has beautifully translated it into English. It reads as if it is in its native language, a feat very rare for translations.

The novel is set in Mauritius during 1944-1945. Mauritius is an island in the middle of the Indian Ocean. The book is about terror and adversity, about hope and exaltation. It is about the little known fact that 1500 Jews were sent from Palestine to Maritius for four years because they did not have the right papers when they landed in Palestine and were viewed by the British as illegal aliens. They are placed in a facility that was somewhere between a concentration camp and prison. One hundred twenty-seven Jews did not survive the four years of imprisonment. It is also the story of a deep and beautiful friendship of two young boys. Raj is nine years old and from Mauritius. David is ten years old and is a Jewish prisoner. He is an orphan from Prague. The story is narrated by Raj when he is seventy years old. He wants to tell his story as precisely as possible.

Raj comes from an extraordinarily impoverished background. He lives with his parents and two brothers in a hut in Mapou. Living conditions were so unsanitary that if a child got sick, it was assumed that he would die. “As a child I was a weakling. Of the three brothers I was the one who was the most fearful, the one who was always somewhat sickly, the one they protected from the dust, the rain, the mud. And yet it was I who survived at Mapou.” His father is a drunk who enjoys physically abusing Raj, his mother and brothers. “If we did not sing the way he wanted he would hit us.” Raj is the child picked to be educated. At school, he learns that not all fathers are like his and that not all children live in mud huts.

Raj and his brothers are very close. One day as they are walking, a terrible storm comes suddenly and both of Raj’s brothers are killed. The family leaves Mapou to resettle in Beau-Bassin where Raj’s father has gotten a job as a guard in the prison. One day, Raj’s father beats him so brutally that he ends up in the prison hospital with “a broken nose, cracked ribs, bruises, a blue pulp instead of a mouth.” It is in the hospital that his friendship with David is forged. David suffers from malaria and dysentery. They have little in the way of a common language but Raj knows some French from school and David speaks French. They slowly and very carefully communicate. Raj thinks that Prague is a village somewhere between Mapou and the prison. He does not know what a Jew is. “I do not know if I ought to be ashamed to say this but that was how it was: I did not know there was a world war on that had lasted for four years and when David asked me at the hospital if I was Jewish I did not know what he meant.” Gradually, Raj learns what is going on in the prison and his friendship with David gets closer and closer.

Serendipitously, Raj finds a way to loosen a piece of barbed wire in the ground and after a deadly cyclone, he manages to get David out of the prison and they start on an impossible journey to freedom. This part of the book has some of the most beautiful scenes I have ever read. Ms. Appanah’s language is spell-binding. It is poetic, lyrical, and sensitive. She takes the reader to places that language rarely takes us – those deep places in the soul where there is only bare and beautiful emotion but no words to describe things.

This book is filled with antithetical meanings. Where there is despair there is happiness; where there is fear there is courage; where there are prisons there is freedom; where there is regret there is hope. On the surface, this is a very sad book, but at its core there is profound beauty and exaltation. It is the story of two “kings,” Raj and David, sharing their kingdom of childhood.

This is the best book I have ever read. It left me speechless and uprooted. I had to re-read it in order to write this review and I know I will read it again many times. It is a book I will recommend to my friends and those who love to read. Thank you, Ms. Appanah, for this remarkable gift.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 15 readers
PUBLISHER:	Graywolf Press; Reprint edition (February 1, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Nathacha Appanah
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another good read: Day for Night by Frederick Reiken

Bibliography:

• Blue Bay Palace (2003)
• The Last Brother (February 2010)

“WHAT community? Is there a COMMUNITY here? Don’t you fucking get it? Are you from fucking Mars? When the average income is fourteen K and the average educational level is eleventh grade and the so-called dairy is a factory fucking farm that employs next to nobody in town, and the Home Depot is where you all fucking work—IF you even work. THAT’S not a community, and it doesn’t become one because people shoot clay pigeons or endearingly call women ‘the missus’ or have fucking parades where they crown a dairy queen! That’s for actors in some anachronistic passion play about a town that never was, in a country that never, ever fucking was.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (APR 11, 2011)

Imagine you are the “outsider” and reporter, Stacy Flynn. You came to this farm town in upstate New York via Cleveland to find the “big-picture” story on rural waste dumping here in off-the-grid Haeden. You’re twenty-four, alert as a cat, keen to pounce like a tiger, with Malcolm X glasses, a postmodern flair, and a Mencken regard. You’ve won an award in the big city, and now that the Rust Belt stories are waning, you seek the newly pelted. But after several years of living among wind-battered farmhouses, tall white flagpoles, crumbled colonials, and broken-down buses, you’re still waiting and suspicious of the omnipotent, industrialized local dairy farm while writing benign pieces about the latent, wall-eyed community.

You languish restively amid the cultural blankness of concrete and caved-in roofs, among the two thousand near-impoverished citizens and the rancid smell of garbage stabbing the air. Menace lurks beneath the folksy façade of the educationally challenged and is carried on the chemical stench of the industrial breeze of its one prosperous family. There is an unacknowledged power that controls its citizens. Here, where suppression and denial is as rooted and contagious as tree rot.

On April 3, 2009, when the naked, sexually brutalized dead body of Wendy White, a nineteen-year-old woman missing for five months, is dumped and subsequently found in a ditch, the meaning is lost on almost everyone. (This isn’t a spoiler–it is the central conceit.) Now, survey the scene. Here is Flynn’s story of toxic transgression, but the townspeople aren’t talking, or they’re talking trash and no one is listening. While people congregate on corners and slink into bars, the police promise they are “pursuing all avenues.” The tight-knit community behaves with boilerplate banality and assumes that it must be a drifter or brought on by a cult of anarchists, the hippies who live here and their ilk of “environmental terrorists.” The people hang onto apocryphal evidence as gospel. Now the town is praying for Wendy White, and the school observes a moment of silence.

More silence?

Alice Piper is a gifted teen and former swim teammate of Wendy. She is the sixteen-year-old daughter of the widely mistrusted and misconceived Pipers, Gene and Claire, who left their profession as physicians years ago to live a quiet self-sustainable life here in Haeden. They sought a place to reconcile their radical ideologies with the realities of the corporate industrial complex. The Pipers raised Alice to question authority–and to examine–not just see, and to engage–not just comply. Alice, like Flynn, can’t simply mourn, move on, and accept an unsolved murder.

The fragmented form of the narrative mirrors the manifest structure of denial, and the gradual revealing of the facts incite the implacable cries of protest. The chapters seem jarring and incongruous at first, detached, non-linear, occupied with unreliable details, specious facts, and compromised evidence. But it reflects the process that Flynn goes through as an investigative reporter, receiving piles of unredacted evidence–exhibits, historical research, interviews, letters, school papers, and chronicles. The reader, like Flynn, is the source of the redaction. What materializes from the inchoate fog is the reader as character and fierce examiner of truth. The view from the pages is malignant and bracing. And that? That is the genius of the author, Cara Hoffman, who appeared to lock me out at the beginning but gripped me in its claw by the end.

This isn’t a genre police procedural or conventional crime thriller. There’s blood, but it’s not gratuitous, and there’s violence, but not in a vacuum. The everyday sexploitation in headlines and entertainment is exposed, like a raw nerve, and examined, with a naked eye, but not directly in the text in bankrupt slogans and empty bromides. It’s finessed, as a corollary, not milked with pithy epiphanies. If anything, it is turned on its head. The desensitization of civilization results from decades of overgrazing in the vicarious thrill of the kill. The assault on our now denuded senses is acute. We know it. Even as we seek more, we feel less. And that is what Cara Hoffman understands. She doesn’t condescend, she weeps. And so did I. And so will you.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 21 readers
PUBLISHER:	Simon & Schuster (March 15, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Cara Hoffman
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Other literary crime stories: Started Early, Took My Dog by Kate Atkinson The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold

Bibliography:

• So Much Pretty (March 2011)

“The living are like spinning tops, powered by a need for atonement, or revenge, or by avoidance, guilt, shame, fear, anger, regret, insecurity, jealousy, whatever, it doesn’t matter because it all derives from the same pop-psyche alphabet soup and oh Lord here comes another best-selling book on the self-help shelf when really if they could just smash all the time-keeping devices excepting sundials, do a crossword puzzle, study the backs of their hands, notice their breath going in and out, drink their food and chew their water, RELAX, it would be a great step forward in the evolution of  the species and the dead would be so grateful.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (MAR 27, 2011)

This is a saga, a sweeping family story that lodges in your marrow, the kind of story that makes you smile, laugh, weep, snort, chortle, sing, spread your arms wide and lay your heart wide open.

With flavors tender, ribald, ironical, farcical, tragic, magical, and wondrous, Sing Them Home narrates an epic story of a family emotionally disrupted by the disappearance of their mother (and wife), Hope, in a Nebraska tornado of 1978. Hope was swept up, along with her Singer sewing machine and a Steinway piano, but she never came down. Due to the absence of her remains, all that stands in the graveyard is her cenotaph.

Twenty-five years later, the three grown-up children are still trying to cope with their grief. None ever married. Larkin, an art history professor (whose work is symbolic with her loss and grief) hides behind food and refuses to “leave the ground.” Gaelan is a weatherman (ah! the irony) who has only superficial, sexual relationships with women, and the youngest, Bonnie, is a virgin and garbologist. She roams after storms to look for “archival” remains of things that flew away in the tornado with their mother. And she talks to the dead at the cemetery.

There is also a beloved but inscrutable stepmother, Viney, (although she never legally married their dad); a large supporting cast of unforgettable characters; ancestral Welsh traditions; and the Nebraska weather and topography, a salient ingredient in pulling the story together.

The prose is beautiful and evocative as the story moves along non-linearly, but with grace. Past events are revealed gradually and build momentum as it catches up to the present. You will experience an intimate relationship with these radiant, unconventional characters and their extraordinary story.

There are some themes similar to The Lovely Bones–loss, unresolved grief, isolation, the meaning of memories and the idea of home. However, Kallos’ novel is richer, more sprawling and textured. John Irving comes to mind, with veins of Philip Roth, Margot Livesy, and Ann Tyler. She is an original, though–she leaves her own memorable imprint.

This is no garden-variety redemption story. It exhilarates with an elixir of spiritual, metaphysical and deeply human voices, of things said, unsaid, unuttered, and forever sung.

For a taste of the author’s wit, poise, sensibility, and charm, read her bio on her website.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 78 readers
PUBLISHER:	Atlantic Monthly Press; 1ST edition (January 6, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Stephanie Kallos
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving Another book that involves a child found in a tree: The Invisible Mountain by Carolina de Robertis

Bibliography:

• Broken for You (2004)
• Sing Them Home (2009)

“Why does she always want more, when this was all there was? ‘I’m sorry, Emmy,’ her mother would say, with her teacher’s maddening patience, ‘but that’s not how the world works.’ ”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (MAR 24, 2011)

Stewart O’Nan may simply be genetically incapable of writing a bad book. His characters are written with precision, intelligence and verisimilitude; they’re so luminously alive that a reader can accurately guess about what they’re eating for dinner or what brand toothpaste they use.

In Emily, Alone, Mr. O’Nan revisits Emily, the Maxell family matriarch from a prior book, Wish You Were Alone. Anyone who is seeking an action-based book or “a story arc” (as taught in college writing classes) will be sorely disappointed. But for those readers who are intrigued by a near-perfect portrait of a winningly flawed elderly woman who is still alive with anxieties, hopes, and frustrations, this is an unsparingly candid and beautifully rendered novel.

Emily Maxwell is part of a gentle but dying breed, a representative of a generation that is anchored to faith, friends and family. She mourns the civilities that are gradually going the way of the dinosaur – thank you notes, Mother’s Day remembrances, and the kindness of strangers. Her two adult children have turned out imperfect – a recovering alcoholic daughter and an eager-to-please son who often acquiesces to an uncaring daughter-in-law.

With her old cadre of friends dwindling and her children caught up in their own lives, Emily fills her days with two-for-one buffet breakfasts with her sister-in-law Arlene, classical music, and her daily routine with her obstreperous dog Rufus, who is instantly recognizable to anyone who has spent life with an aging, sometimes unruly, always goofy and loving animal.

Whether she’s caring for and about her Arlene, trying to keep up with family holiday traditions, keeping tabs on a house sale nearby, and trying to do the right thing in educating her children about executor’s duties, Emily struggles to find purpose. She recognizes that time is not on her side any longer and reflects, “The past was the past. Better to work on the present instead of wallowing, and yet the one comforting thought was also the most infuriating. Time, which had her on the rack, would just as effortlessly rescue her. This funk was temporary. Tomorrow she would be fine.”

The thing is, we all know Emily. She is our grandmother, our mother, our piano teacher, our neighbor. She is the woman who gets up each day and attends the breakfast buffet or participates in a church auction, or waits eagerly for the mail carrier or feels perplexed about preening teenagers who blast their stereo too loud. She is the one who wonders whether she should have tried a little harder with her kids, even though “she’d tried beyond the point where others might have reasonably given up.” She is the woman who senses that life is waning but still intends to hang on as long as possible and go for the gusto.

The fact that Stewart O’Nan can take an “invisible woman” – someone we nod to pleasantly and hope she won’t engage us in conversation too long – and explore her interior and exterior life is testimony to his skill. Mr. O’Nan writes about every woman…and shows that there is no life that can be defined as ordinary.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 6 readers
PUBLISHER:	Viking Adult (March 17, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Stewart O’Nan
EXTRAS:	Author Q&A and Reading Guide
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Last Night at the Lobster

Bibliography:

• In the Walled Cities: Stories (1993)
• Snow Angels (October 1994)
• The Names of the Dead (1996)
• The Speed Queen (1997)
• A World Away (1998)
• A Prayer for the Dying (1999)
• Everyday People (2001)
• Wish You Were Here (2002)
• The Night Country (2003)
• The Good Wife (2005)
• The Last Night at the Lobster (November 2007)
• Songs for the Missing (October 2008)
• Emily, Alone (March 2011)

Nonfiction:

Movies from books:

“The ‘Alive’ simulator at the BookWorld Conference is one of those devices that all characters should try at least once. The experience of being real has two purposes: firstly, to assist characters in their quest for a greater understanding of people and, secondly, to discourage characters from ever attempting to escape to the RealWorld. Most customers last ten minutes before hitting the panic button and being led shaken from the simulator.”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowsky  (MAR 8, 2011)

In Jasper Fforde’s One of Our Thursdays is Missing, the fictional Thursday Next takes center stage. Although she and the real Thursday look alike, they differ in a number of ways. The real Thursday Next is a veteran agent of Jurisfiction, fiction’s “policing elite.” She’s tough and ruthless towards her enemies, and will do anything to protect the integrity of the BookWorld. Her fictional counterpart, on the other hand, is gentle and dignified. She would rather hug than fight. As originally written, Thursday was a “violent and disorderly” character “who slept her way around the BookWorld and caused no end of murder, misery and despair.” The fictional Thursday toned down the character considerably, which led to a precipitous drop in readership. When the real Thursday (let’s call her RT) goes missing, the fictional Thursday (FT) steps up to the plate, endangering her life to find RT and keep the enemies of the BookWorld from starting a Genre War.

Fforde indulges in his unique brand of inspired insanity, sprinkling his narrative with a plethora of puns, satirical jibes (FT opens her door to greet three “Dostogerskivites”–refugees from “Crime and Punishment”– who state that are on their way home from “a redemption-through-suffering training course”), wacky chase scenes, and a great deal of assorted mayhem. Those who have not read the previous installments of this series will be hopelessly lost. Even regulars will need to be on their toes to keep up with the byzantine plot.

FT is tapped to do a job for the JAID, the Jurisfiction Accident Investigation Department. Along with her butler, a loyal and highly competent robot named Spockett, she undertakes the task, only to find that it is a far more dangerous job than she had first imagined. Her adventures will take her on a brief foray into the RealWorld, where she has a poignant encounter with Landon, RT’s beloved husband. Upon returning to the BookWorld, she will need all of her wits, acting talent, and courage to stay alive and find Thursday before it is too late. Much to her chagrin, she and Sprockett are being stalked by the tenacious and deadly “Men in Plaid.”

One of Our Thursdays is Missing is hopelessly silly and incredibly imaginative. If you look carefully, you will notice that Fforde slips in insightful commentary about such topics as the economic downturn, the rise of e-readers, trendy publishing fads (fantasy and vampires are on an upswing), vanity presses, faked memoirs, and pseudo-intellectuals. Those who love literary allusions, clever spoofs, and original and off-beat plots and characters will find this installment a welcome and entertaining addition to the Thursday Next canon.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 17 readers
PUBLISHER:	Viking Adult (March 8, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Eleanor Bukowsky
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Jasper Fforde
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review: Shades of Grey Nursery Crime series: The Big Over Easy The Fourth Bear And more Thursday Next novels: Lost in a Good Book The Well of Lost Plots Something Rotten First Among Sequels

Bibliography:

Thursday Next Series:

• The Eyre Affair (January 2002)
• Lost in a Good Book (April 2003)
• The Well of Lost Plots (February 2004)
• Something Rotten (August 2004)
• First Amongst Sequels (July 2007)
• One of our Thursdays is Missing (March 2011)

Nursery Crimes:

• The Big Over Easy (July 2005)
• The Fourth Bear (August 2006)

Colors Trilogy:

• Shades of Grey (January 2010)

“Thinking back, he is surprised at the quantity of time he spent in daydreams. His private fictions have sustained him from one day to the next, even as the world itself has become nonsense. It never occurred to him to consider that the greatest portion of his spirit might have been poured into this creation. But it is not a despairing conclusion. His daydreams were a life’s endeavor of sorts, and now, when everything else is cast off, they are still at hand.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  (Mar 6, 2011)

How do you write about failure?

Early in this book, its protagonist, Ulrich, a young Bulgarian man studying chemistry in Berlin, is walking down a corridor after Albert Einstein, who drops a sheaf of papers. When he picks them up and runs after the great man, Einstein thanks him by saying “I would be nothing without you.” Much later in life, after his own career has been a failure by all outward measures, and life has almost been crushed out of him by Soviet austerity, Ulrich comes to learn more about Einstein and his callousness to some of those closest to him, and realizes that genius feeds off the failure of others. “The people close to him were blocked up and cut off. Their lives were subdued, and they were prevented from doing what they hoped to do. [...] How many stopped-up men and women does it take to produce one Einstein?” Ulrich realizes that when Einstein spoke those words, “it was not success he saw written in my face. He saw, rather, that I would never accomplish anything at all.”

I suspect that this insight might have been the genesis of this daring novel. How might it have been for a non-Einstein, a scientist forced to abandon his studies, a musician without a violin, a human being neutered by a grey regime? What might he have had to offer the world other than dreams? Seeing that Dasgupta gives his novel a musical title, and calls its two parts “movements,” I also suspect that his musical inspiration might have been Bela Bartok’s “Two Portraits for Violin and Orchestra” of 1908. This is a two-movement composition reworking the same material in two contrasted ways, the first elegiac and slow, and the second frenetic and distorted. This is exactly the structure of Dasgupta’s novel: a first part about a life lived in shades of grey, followed by a second dream-life in strident color.

The concept is daring because it deals with mediocrity and failure in a strikingly bipolar way. But Dasgupta’s ideas require him to generate enough momentum to keep one reading through the Slavic gloom of Ulrich’s deterioration in the first part and present the second as a convincing and relevant reworking of the material. Unfortunately, in order to emphasize the contrast between the two “movements,” the author shoots himself in the foot. The second part, despite a certain flashy vulgarity, is not uninteresting, but you have to get through the first part in order to reach it — 160 pages devoid of music, poetry, or inner beauty. For instance, we first see Ulrich as a young boy fascinated with music. His mother buys him a violin, but when his father returns from a business trip some months later, he throws the instrument into the fire. This happens on page 18, and from then on there is virtually no music in the first part of the book — not even in the writing, which is dry and declarative almost throughout: this happened; then that happened; then something else.

Ulrich transfers his interests to chemistry. He gets to study in Berlin, but has to abandon his degree when his parents lose their money. Back in Sofia, he works as a clerk, then as the manager of a chemical factory charged with impossible goals in each successive Five Year Plan. His romantic life fizzles out in failure. Now retired, blind, poor, and nearing 100, all he has are the daydreams which form his legacy. Or so we are told. The first part ends with the quotation I offer above, but this is the first we hear of any daydreams at all. By depriving Ulrich of any inner life in the first part, Dasgupta sets up his contrast all right, but he deprives the reader also.

Ulrich’s daydreams make up the second movement, and they restore at least some of the music that had vanished so completely earlier. But it is a savage music, a grotesque scherzo. It begins almost as a series of short stories: a near-feral boy playing on an old fiddle in an abandoned factory, the beautiful but impoverished daughter of a former princess who marries a Georgian gangster and takes on much of his ruthlessness, and an American record producer credited with the invention of world music as a popular genre. Eventually, these strands interweave. Dasgupta has gifts as a storyteller, and there is a color, an energy, a wild poetry here that the first part lacks. But he is a self-conscious writer who now seems determined to bring in all the hues he had previously denied. His moments of ecstasy go over the top, and there is too much reliance on drugs, alcohol, and sex. None of these characters is entirely likeable, and this second part also reflects the wanton hardness, squandering of resources, and disregard for humanity that made the first part so distasteful. Yet at least this preserves an element of truth in the fun-house mirror, in a way a more sentimental ending might not.

Nonetheless, this novel about a mediocrity is by no means mediocre itself. It is an original concept that might work for other readers. So let’s end with Ulrich passing his legacy to Boris, the dream alter-ego whose violin playing has rocketed him to stardom: “I have a lot of failure to give away. Look at my music: a fantastic failure. A triumphant failure. That’s the legacy I leave behind. If I could make an Einstein with my failed science, think what will come of my music!”

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 18 readers
PUBLISHER:	Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1 edition (February 1, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Rana Dasgupta
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More music melded with literature: An Unfinished Score by Elise Blackwell

Bibliography:

• Tokyo Cancelled (2005)
• Solo (2009; February 2011 in US)

“It’s good early in life to experience success. It puts you on the right track for later on, when it counts. You don’t learn a god damned thing from defeat. That’s the wrong track and defeat stays with you and becomes the expected thing. It’s a chain around your neck.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (MAR 02, 2011)

Ward Just is a writer’s writer, as straightforward and gritty and no-nonsense as Chicago—the city from which he hails. His solid 17th novel carries a seemingly enigmatic title – Rodin’s Debutante – a curiosity, considering the book has nothing to do with Rodin or debutantes.

But wait – as in much of Ward Just’s work, there is complexity and hidden meaning behind the seeming simplicity. Sculpturally, Rodin – the progenitor of modern sculpture — possessed a distinctive ability to model a complex, turbulent, deeply pocketed surface in clay. Similarly, Lee Goodell, the key protagonist of Rodin’s Debutante, takes his own unformed life and sculpts it, in an education that stretches from the boarding school at the Ogden Hall School of Boys to the mean south side city streets of Chicago.

The story begins in the early 20th century with the bellicose Tommy Ogden, a rough-edged Chicago tycoon who thwarts his wife Maria’s desire to travel to Paris to commission her own Rodin bust; instead, he chooses to endow a Midwestern boy’s prep school. A Rodin bust of an anonymous debutante does eventually grace Ogden Hall’s Library, but it is not the bust of Maria Ogden, despite commonly accepted wisdom. It is “just appearances” and a metaphor for what life is all about.

Flash forward many decades. The story shifts to Lee Goodell. He and his family live in New Jesper, a quiet traditional town off the shores of Lake Michigan, where Lee’s innocence is shattered after a particularly violent sex crime of a classmate. Lee – a self-described observer of life – ends up at enrolling at Ogden Hall, where he excels; he, too, wants to sculpt. In a twist of fate, he meets the now reclusive millionaire and gushes to him, “I believe Rodin’s bust of your late wife is a wonderful work of art. It’s a great thing to have in the library. It’s an inspiration. It’s been an inspiration to me.” A bemused Tommy Ogden casually shatters that illusion…the first of many illusions that will be shattered for Lee.

And that is the book’s core theme: the divergence of false appearance and reality. Whether it’s the falsity of a respectable community where the truth never sees the light of day, the false appearance of harmony in Hyde Park, which is rife with class and racial distinctions, or the falsity of the legend behind Rodin’s debutante marble statue, life is never what it seems, only what you make it. The fact that Lee becomes a sculptor, too, is also no accident. He finds comfort in a slab of unformed marble, where possibilities are infinite, and where he has the control of shaping the outcome. In this career, the ideal of art and the reality of life are finally able to blend.

Lee Goodell is a good man…perhaps, a bit too good, which translates into not enough of the pockmarks and imperfections that lead to a fully-rounded and satisfying key character. Still, this is a solid piece of work, with sparse and powerful prose, rich observations, and a meticulously crafted plot. The sense of place, the crude glamour of rough-and-ready mid-century Chicago is spot-on. Rodin’s Debutante is a very worthy addition to Ward Just’s fine craftsman-like body of work.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 4 readers
PUBLISHER:	Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1 edition (March 1, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia on Ward Just
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More Chicago fiction: Dream City by Brendan Short

Bibliography:

• A Soldier of the Revolution (1970)
• The Congressman Who Loved Flaubert: Stories (1973)
• Stringer (1974)
• Nicholson at Large (1975)
• Honor, Power, Riches, Fame and the Love of Women: Stories (1979)
• A Family Trust (1978)
• In the City of Fear (1982)
• The American Blues (1984)
• The American Ambassador (1987)
• Jack Gance (1989)
• Twenty-one Selected Stories (1990)
• The Translator (1991)
• Ambition & Love (1994)
• Echo House (1997)
• A Dangerous Friend (1999)
• Lowell Limpett and Two Stories (2001)
• The Weather in Berlin (2002)
• An Unfinished Season (2004)
• Forgetfulness (2006)
• Exiles in the Garden (2009)
• Rodin’s Debutante (March 2011)

Nonfiction:

• To What End: Report from Vietnam (1968)
• Military Men (1970)

“Gilgamesh, whither rovest thou? The life you seek you shall not find.”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte  (MAR 01, 2011)

In his fantastic and insightful book, On Writing, the prolific writer Stephen King once said: “People love to read about work. God knows why, but they do.”

But what if that work is especially mind-numbing and unfulfilling and involves plodding away at an outfit called the Tank—chatting, shuffling papers, composing reports, sending e-mails and wondering where things went wrong? Would that still make for a readable story? As Thomas Kennedy’s new book, Falling Sideways shows, the answer is yes.

It’s probably because most readers will be able to relate to the book’s central protagonist, Fred Breathwaite. Breathwaite is an American expat living in Denmark, his adopted country, and works as an international liaison at the Tank—he is its “eyes in the greater world outside of Denmark” which means he is also responsible for bringing in international clients and accounts. Breathwaite has no great fascination for his job—as the book opens, he is dreading the Wednesday morning meeting at the “Mumble Club” a weekly meeting of department heads—but knows that the job affords him material comforts and a comfortable life he otherwise would not have had.

Breathwaite has older children comfortably settled and leading their own lives but it his youngest, Jes, who “gave him cause for concern and hope.” The teenaged Jes is convinced he does not want his life to turn out like his Dad’s. It seemed to Jes that “almost nobody in Denmark actually did anything anymore; they all just sat in offices sending e-mails to one another or went to meetings where they sat around a table and talked about the e-mails…Meanwhile, there were a million truly important things that needed doing in the world, things that were a matter of life and death for people who lived in poverty and misery. Jes wanted a foot into that door. And meanwhile, he wanted to do something concrete,” Kennedy writes. This “something concrete” is work at a key shop owned by an Afghani immigrant—Jes works here with his hands duplicating keys and reading Rilke is his spare time.

The elder Breathwaite can’t stand to see his son throw away his life. “The boy had all the right ideas and not a chance of realizing them,” he thinks. It is this conflict between father and son that forms one of the two central theses in the novel.

The other of course, is Breathwaite’s own job. Early in the book, he finds out he is being laid off and replaced by a younger executive Harald Jaeger, a skirt-chasing insecure worker with personal problems of his own. Breathwaite uses this career turn to question what the net sum of his life has really amounted to.

Falling Sideways is populated by a whole host of other characters including Martin Kampman, CEO of the Tank, and professional downsizer; Martin’s son, Adam, who also rebels against his father; and Birgitte Somers, the company’s CFO.

Falling Sideways is the second book in Kennedy’s “Copenhagen Quartet” to be released in the United States. The city comes alive in these pages and Kennedy does a fantastic job of portraying the city in the beautiful season of fall. The problem with Falling Sideways is that it does not meet the high expectations set by the first book in the quartet, In the Company of Angels. Compared to that earlier work, this one seems much more ordinary, its conclusion and narrative path foretold well before the end. In addition, quite a few of the characters seem clichéd and flat—probably because Kennedy never gets a chance to realize them fully. Nevertheless if the point of the quartet is to show Kennedy’s “range,” this book does that task well.

Together, the Copenhagen quartet is meant to encompass the four enduring seasons and if the first two books are any indication, the quartet is on its way to achieve this objective very effectively. In The Company of Angels embodies the spirit of spring. It is possible, after all, to view that book as a ray of hope despite horrific events in the characters’ past. In Falling Sideways, it is the melancholic allure of fall that beautifully permeates the novel. The season of decay and slow death is a perfect metaphor for the downward spiral many of the characters face. And just like the season, there are brief and spectacular splashes of color before it all ends.

It is fitting that Gilgamesh makes a brief appearance in the book. The moral of the story, if there is any, is that one could do no worse than to follow the timeless advice given to Gilgamesh:

Make thou merry by day and by night.
Of each day make thou a feast or rejoicing,
Pay heed to the little one that holds thy hand,
Let thy spouse delight in thy bosom,
For this is the task of mankind.

But as many of the characters in Falling Sideways realize, sometimes the best advice is the hardest to follow.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 1 readers
PUBLISHER:	Bloomsbury USA (March 1, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Thomas E. Kennedy
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: In The Company of Angels And another book all about office work: And Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris

Bibliography:

• Crossing Borders (1990)
• A Weather of the Eye (1996)
• Unreal City: Stories (1996)
• The Book of Angels (1997)
• Drive, Dive, Dance & Fight: Stories (1997)
• A Passion in the Desert (2007)
• Cast Upon the Day: Stories (2007)

The Copenhagen Quartet:

• Bluett’s Blue Hours (2002)
• Danish Fall (2003) To be published as Falling Sideways (March 2011 US and UK)
• Greene’s Summer (2004) Published as In the Company of Angels (March 2010 US and UK)
• Kerrigan’s Copenhagen: A Love Story (2005)

Nonfiction:

• Andre Dubus: A Study of the Short Fiction (1988)
• The American Short Story Today (1991) (with Henrik Specht)
• Robert Coover: A Study of the Short Fiction (1992)
• Index to American Short Story Award Collections (1993)
• Realism & Other Illusions: Essays on the Craft of Fiction (2002)
• The Literary Traveler (2005) (with Walter Cummins)
• Riding the Dog: A Look Back at America (2008)

“Love is a monstrous selfishness.”

Book Review:

Review by Doug Bruns  (FEB 22, 2011)

They say there are two sides to every story. In the case of Portraits of a Marriage, there are three. There is the story of the erstwhile housekeeper cum second wife, Judit; the pragmatic and loving first wife, Ilona; and there is Peter’s story, the husband of wife number one and wife number two, whom we find at the end of the novel, lost and destitute. It is not a complicated story, the one told here; nor is it particularly unique or poignant, though the story is laced with insight. The story told here, the story, as the title suggests, of a marriage, is told in straight-forward narrative, albeit from three perspectives, and set against the fabric of a damaged Hungary between the wars. It is an elegant and beautiful book, a rich tapestry on love, marriage and class. It is, as well, deeply psychological, almost Jamesianly so.

Sándor Márai (1900-1989) was unknown to me prior to this novel. A quick Wikipedia check informed me that I was not alone. Largely forgotten outside of his native Hungary, his work has only recently (since 1992) been “rediscovered” and now appears in over a dozen languages around the world. The entry noted that he is “now considered to be part of the European Twentieth Century literary canon.” The cover to this book states that it is a “new translation of a rediscovered novel by the great Hungarian writer…” A quick look at the copyright page informed me that the novel was originally published in Budapest, Hungary in 1941. Indeed, the book had the rugged texture of war-torn Europe, such as only, I assume, can be created in the midst of strife and chaos. In this way, the book reminded me of Suite Francaise, by Irène Némirovsky, such was the quiet and controlled nervousness and tension.

The book opens with a first-person narration. “Look, see that man? Wait! Turn your head away, look at me, keep talking. I wouldn’t like it if he glanced this way and spotted me.” We discover two women, one who’s voice is present, the other mute to us, sitting in the sun on a winter day eating pistachio ice cream. As the women visit, the narrator tells the story of the man who has just been spotted, Peter. The voice we hear is that of Ilona and she is now many years removed from the marriage which she describes. Yet, it is evident that she still loves him deeply. “Does it show I have been crying?…My heart still beats faster when I see him.” For this is the view of the marriage Ilona carries, a view of deep love for her husband, then and still.

Ilona outlines the marriage for us. We learn of their early years, of the birth and loss of a child, of the tensions of Peter’s business, his stoic and precise nature. “…he did read a lot, ‘systematically’–his favorite word–a little too systematically for my taste. I read passionately, according to mood.” That dynamic, Peter’s systematic approach to life, juxtaposed with Ilona’s passion, define the marriage. Eventually Ilona discovers that Peter’s heart belongs to another. The discovery is quietly and calmly confronted and the marriage dissolves. The abiding discovery of Ilona’s tale is her unconditional love for Peter. It is steadfast and complete, and when the marriage is over, she is herself less complete, less a person for love lost.

The second narration, Part II, is Peter’s account of things. It begins, much like Ilona’s, with a first-person observation. “See the pair just leaving, there by the revolving doors?…That woman was my wife. Not the first [Ilona], but the second [Judit]. We’ve been divorced for three years.” Peter, like Ilona, is accompanied by a friend, a foil for the unraveling of the tale. Of his marriage to Ilona, Peter confesses: “I lacked the courage to accept the tenderness of the woman who loved me. I resisted. I even looked down on her a little for it, because she was different from me–une petite bourgeoise.” We learn that Peter has been in love, for many years, with the hired woman of his parents, a young maid. This is the woman at the center of Ilona’s discovery. But his love is chaste. Prior to his first marriage, his affection for Judit is declared, deemed impossible and he subsequently leaves home and country. Upon return he marries a woman more in keeping with the family standard, Ilona. But Peter is incapable of love, it seems. “Is there anyone alive capable of surviving under the reign of terror called love.” With one exception. He loved his child, now lost. “Love is feeling without an end in view,” he declares. But with the child’s death, comes an “end in view,” and so is gone his love. He leaves the marriage and eventually marries the woman of his youthful fancy, Judit.

Judit’s story, another first-person narration, is the most complex and psychologically compelling. We meet her, along with a lover, long after her marriage to Peter has dissolved. “His problem was that he was bourgeois,” she declares without irony. She is in a hotel suite with her young lover and spinning her tale. Obviously, Judit, the erstwhile maid, has risen–clawed, is more apt–above her station and achieved her goal, that is, she is no longer a handmaiden, but a woman of means, a woman men long for. Of her early encounter with Peter, she relates, “The one day he asked to speak to me. He said he wanted to marry me–me, the maid! I didn’t quite understand what he was talking about, but at that moment I hated him so much I could have spat at him.” But marry him she does, as he is the vehicle by which she can achieve her means. But, as she says to her lover, “There was a time when I was in love with him, of course, but that’s only because I hadn’t lived with him yet. Love and being in love don’t go together, you know.”

There is one last story told, a brief account given by the man we meet in Judit’s bed. He escapes the war and journeys to America, where his path crosses briefly with Peter’s. It is a tidy approach and rounds out the tale, nicely tying up a few loose ends.

Although the novel is titled Portraits of a Marriage, it would be more accurate to call it “Portraits of Love.” The marriage is nothing more than the vehicle by which love might be exercised–and lost. Ilona’s love was Peter. Peter’s love was his child. Judit’s love was for breaking away from her petty origins, her poverty, and eventually the war; it was ultimately a love for a future of her creation. Tragically, all three lose what they love. The notion is summarized by Peter at the end of his narration: “You see, one day I realized that no one can help me. It is love people want…but there’s no one who can help with it, never.” (Translated by George Szirtes.)

AMAZON READER RATING:	from X readers
PUBLISHER:	Knopf (February 22, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Doug Bruns
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Sándor Márai
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Casanova in Bolzano Esthers Inheritance

Bibliography:

• Embers (1942; September 2001)
• Casanova in Bolzano (1940; November 2004)
• The Rebels (1930; March 2007)
• Esther’s Inheritance (1938; November 2008)
• Portraits of a Marriage (1941; February 2011)

Nonfiction:

• Memoir of Hungary, 1944-1948 (1996)

“The past, if there is such a thing, is mostly empty space, great expanses of nothing, in which significant persons and events float.”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte  (FEB 8, 2011)

When Julius, a young psychiatrist living in New York, looks out of his apartment window, he likes to watch the birds fly past. And when he occasionally spots geese flying in formation, he wonders how our life below would look like to them. This same external perspective—which one could argue immigrants master especially well—permeates Teju Cole’s debut novel, Open City.

Like Cole, Julius is a Nigerian immigrant to the United States. As the novel opens, we learn that he loves to take walks all over New York City. The walks are freeing, a meditative contemplation not just of the present but also of the past, and Julius treasures them. “As interesting as my research project was—I was conducting a clinical study of affective disorders in the elderly—the level of detail it demanded was of an intricacy that exceeded anything else I had done thus far. The streets served as a welcome opposite to all that,” Julius says, “Every decision—where to turn left, how long to remain lost in thought in front of an abandoned building, whether to watch the sun set over New Jersey, or to lope in the shadows on the East Side looking across to Queens—was inconsequential, and was for that reason, a reminder of freedom.”

As Julius goes on these walks, he holds forth on a wide variety of topics—from the history of New York to the genius of composer Gustav Mahler. He especially enjoys long talks with 89-year-old Professor Saito, a teacher who had taken Julius under his wing when he was still a junior at Maxwell College.

The reader is afforded brief glimpses of Julius’s past—a fractured history with his mother from whom he is estranged just before he leaves for America at the age of seventeen; a military school upbringing which manages to inject some measure of discipline into an otherwise restless life. Julius’s mother is white (a German) and father, Nigerian. His mixed-race status also turns out to lead to his rootlessness. “The name Julius linked me to another place and was, with my passport and skin color, one of the intensifiers of my sense of being different, of being set apart, in Nigeria,” he recalls, “I had a Yoruba middle name, Olatubosun, which I never used. That name surprised me a little each time I saw it on my passport or birth certificate, like something that belonged to someone else but had long been held in my keeping.”

About halfway through the book, Julius takes an extended vacation in Brussels harboring a small hope that he’ll run into his grandmother (mother’s mother) there. He remembers Oma’s brief visit to Nigeria when he was young and despite the strained relationship she had with her daughter, Julius suspects there is more to this story than meets the eye.

It is in Brussels that Julius meets a young Moroccan named Farouq, who runs the Internet café that Julius frequents. Through his voice, Cole again holds forth on the larger political topics of the day including the global war on terror.

Open City, with its meandering ruminations of disparate topics, is not for readers who look for books with specific plot lines and incidents. And while Julius discusses many subjects of immediate interest at length (even the New York City bedbug epidemic gets an airing here), he is less than forthcoming about what seems to have been a less than straightforward past. It is never clear for example exactly what happened between Julius and his mother before he left for the United States. It speaks volumes that one learns more about Julius from an old Nigerian acquaintance he runs into, Moji Kasali, than from Julius himself. Such wandering and unresolved questions might try some readers. But readers who love an informed and intelligent voice and are not averse to freewheeling discussions, will love Open City.

As for Moji, she turns out to be the sister of an old friend of Julius and when he suddenly runs into her in the city, he can’t place her immediately. The important fact she reveals about Julius reminds us about how arbitrary memory and its related associations can be. “Each person must, on some level, take himself as the calibration point for normalcy, must assume that the room of his own mind is not, cannot be, entirely opaque to him,” Julius says, “Perhaps this is what we mean by sanity: that, whatever our self-admitted eccentricities might be, we are not the villains of our own stories.” But if memory is selective how can we ever be sure about our roles in our lives and in those of others? Cole’s Open City is ultimately an exploration of this central theme: Are we truly not the villains of our own stories? Or do we just choose to remember only those parts of our lives that paint us as heroes?

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 8 readers
PUBLISHER:	Random House (February 8, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Teju Cole
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another Nigerian immigrant fiction: The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Another great New York City novel: Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann

Bibliography:

• Open City (February 2011)