“Irish nor English, Jerseyman nor bushborn nor savage, not Roman or Episcopalian or apostate, Judah was the wilderness on two legs, mute and unknowable, a blankness that could drown a man.”

Book Review:

Review by Friederike Knabe  (APR 8, 2011)

Michael Crummey opens his new novel with Judah, sitting in a “makeshift asylum cell, shut away with the profligate stink of fish that clung to him all his days.” Only Mary Tryphena Devine comes near him these days, urging him to take a little food – or, if he doesn’t want to eat – to just die. Judah’s story is the primary, yet not the only otherworldly theme that glides through this multigenerational family saga, touching everybody in its wake. The novel is set in one of Newfoundland’s wild and rough eastern coastal regions, and, more specifically, in two remote fishing villages, Paradise Deep and The Gut.

Crummey, himself a Newfoundlander, has written this highly imaginative, superbly crafted folkloric tale that blends with great ease strands of supernatural magic of old fairy tales and beliefs into a chronicle of the early colonists’ precarious existence. Spanning over one hundred years, starting with the early eighteen hundreds, the author spins a tall tale of life in the early settler communities, that delves deep into personal relationships, social strife between the Irish and West-country English, the political and the religious powers, competing for influence and control.

In the first few pages, Crummey hints at important future developments, but then he quickly moves back in time to events when Mary Tryphena was a child and a whale had beached itself on the shore of Paradise Deep. The villagers, starving and desperate for food after another meager fishing season and an icy-cold winter of scarcity, cannot believe their luck. However, when they carefully cut through the animal’s flesh, a human-like body emerges from its belly. Devine’s Widow (Mary Tryphena’s grandmother and one of the most powerful personalities in The Gut) while preparing the body for burial, turns him over, and the strange, completely white figure starts coughing up water, blood and small fishes…! He cuts an unusual figure among the locals and he stinks of sea and rotten fish, a smell that is so overpowering that nobody wants to be near him…

The locals, God-fearing yet illiterate, and with the priest not due for a visit for some time, cannot agree which of the biblical names belongs to the “story with the whale” and as a compromise decide on “Judah.” While suspicious of him from the outset – not just physically is he an oddity, being completely white from head to toe, he also appears unable (unwilling?) to speak – the villagers, who have a tendency towards superstition, start blaming the intruder for all the mishaps that are befalling them. Until, that is, when Judah joins one of the fishing boats and leading them to the most amazing catch. Is this a one-off occurrence or will the fate of the poor fishermen from The Gut finally change for the better?

Judah’s survival is intricately linked to the Devine family, the most important clan in The Gut. Paradise Deep is controlled by the Seller clan, wealthy merchants who own more than their share and exert their power over the communities by any means, legal or not. The clans’ disputes and quarrels go back to a personal fight between Devine’s Widow and King-me Sellers, the matriarch and patriarch of the respective clan, but over the generations it expands into a constant rivalry between the Irish and West-Country English, between poor illiterate fisher folks living in The Gut and the merchants/land owners from Paradise Deep. Crummey weaves such an intricate six generation portrait of the two clans and the people around them that it is difficult to go into details without revealing too much of the events or the many individuals that stand out as full-fleshed characters. For his realistic and factual backdrop, the author touches the political developments on Newfoundland, such as rise of the first fishermen’s union at the turn of the nineteenth century, and far away places where some of the younger generation escape to or fight in the first World War. Nonetheless, he never loses his focus on the local people of the two villages and, especially the women who carry a tremendous burden to ensure the survival of the next generation.

To help the reader through the myriad of names and characters that come to life in the story, a genealogical chart is displayed upfront with the names of the numerous offspring through the six generations. I can only recommend, however, not to look at this chart, if at all possible, prior to at least reaching part 2 of the novel. While such a chart is useful to remind us who is related to whom, and in what generation we find ourselves, it does hint at some surprising cross connections that are better discovered in due course as it will take away some of the pleasure in discovering and reading this rich tale.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 78 readers
PUBLISHER:	Other Press; Reprint edition (March 29, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Friederike Knabe
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Michael Crummey
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another “whale” of a tale: Fluke by Christopher Moore Another “folklore” novel: The Tiger’s Wife by Téa Obreht

Bibliography:

• Flesh and Blood: Short Stories (1998; 2003)
• River Thieves (2001)
• The Wreckage (2005 in Canada only)
• Galore (2011) Commonweatlth Prize

Poetry:

• Arguments with Gravity (1996)
• Hard Light (1998)
• Emergency Road Assistance (2001)
• Salvage (2002)
• Went With (2007)
• Under the Keel (April 2013)

“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 25 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)  Commonwealth Prize

“And when he wakes from dreaming of her, is it not the same for him? The hollowness in his chest, the tense yearning, the loneliness he braces against every morning…Not love. Something else, something with a power that endures. Not love, but a memory of love.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (FEB 14, 2011)

Incalculable grief cleaves to profound love in this elaborate, helical tapestry of a besieged people in postwar Freetown, Sierra Leone. Interlacing two primary periods of violent upheaval, author Aminatta Forna renders a scarred nation of people with astonishing grace and poise–an unforgettable portrait of open wounds and closed mouths, of broken hearts and fractured spirits, woven into a stunning evocation of recurrence and redemption, loss and tender reconciliation. Forna mines a filament of hope from resigned fatalism, from the devastation of a civil war that claimed 50,000 lives and displaced 2.5 million people. Those that survived felt hollowed out, living with an uneasy peace.

Over 99% of people suffered from unrelieved post-traumatic stress disorder, and those that survived often hid shameful secrets of forced betrayal. Here you have children, now adults, trying to cope after their brutal coercion with rebel soldiers. They are living with the aftermath of “nothing left to lose.” If you can imagine an unspeakable atrocity, it was likely executed. Blood on the hands of the people who remain seep into the pores of the newly arrived.

Three principal characters form the locus of this story–a psychologist, a surgeon, and an academic. The story goes through seamless temporal shifts–from 1969, a period of unrest following a military coup–to 2001, following ten years of civil war begun in 1991.

Adrian Lockheart is a British psychologist on sabbatical from his failing marriage to accept a (second) post in Freetown. He is compassionate and dogged in his pursuit to treat the population of mentally disturbed and traumatized citizens, to help them find hope and resolve, yet he feels emotionally dislocated from his own family at home.

“The truth is that since arriving here his life has seemed more charged with meaning than it ever had in London. Here the boundaries are limitless, no horizon, no sky. He can feel his emotions, solid and weighty, like stones in the palm of his hands.”

Adrian treats tortured men and women in the fallout of war, finding a particularly poignant interest in Agnes, a woman who is suffering from a fugue disorder. He contends that the endless miles she compulsively roams on foot (and subsequently forgets) indicate a search for something meaningful from the ruins of war. He believes she is going toward somewhere, a place he determines to find out.

Adrian’s most prominent patient is the unreliable narrator, Elias Cole, an elderly, retired history professor dying of pulmonary disease. In this city of silence, Elias is compelled to tell his story, his confession, to Adrian. It begins in 1969, when Elias first laid eyes on Saffia Kamara, a charming and comely botanist married to the gregarious, fearless Julius, an academic at the university.

“People are wrong when they talk of love at first sight. It is neither love nor lust. No. As she walks away from you, what you feel is loss. A premonition of loss.”

Julius, Elias, and Saffia embark on a friendship that inextricably points to the destiny of the next generation. The military coups of the late 60’s followed Sierra Leon’s hard-won independence from the British colonial rule. Political unrest led to widespread paranoia, which in turn led to wobbly allegiances. Elias’s confession to Adrian is the rallying point, which heightens all the other narratives. Adrian’s probing of Elias reaches to encounters outside of the hospital, and will alter the course of his life, and too of the story.

Lastly, there is Kai Manseray, a talented, young orthopedic surgeon, a tireless and tormented man plagued by chronic insomnia and a suppressed and devastating history. Kai chose to stay and help the damaged and impoverished, rather than abscond two years ago with his best friend, Tejani. He is torn between his loyalties in Sierra Leone and his desire for a more elite station in the States. The woman he loved has gone, the city ravaged, the people embattled, but his little cousin, Abass, and the patients who need him keep him anchored. He has secrets that he won’t share with anyone, that threaten to undo him in the operating theater.

As the story highlights the contrast of their professions, Kai and Adrian form a tenuous bond of friendship. Kai’s achievements are measurable–stitching, sewing, patching, cutting, and saving lives. Adrian, however, can’t measure his patients’ success with an X-ray or point to approximated edges of a wound. Psychotherapy is a process of encounters, wending your way through the dark channels of a person’s interior and facilitating change through conversation. Kai and Adrian’s bond is ultimately the most hypnotic, with consequences encroaching on the dark side of hope.

Forna constructs a mesmerizing collision of forces and people that slowly propel the reader toward a towering climax. This story is for the committed reader, the patient literature lover who will undertake many hours of dedication for the inevitable reward. Think of a blank canvas, and every sentence as a mindful brushstroke, a bloom on the page. It takes a while for the picture to materialize. The writing is carefully crafted, and yet imperceptibly so, not in the least self-conscious. She is steadily augmenting, fuller and deeper, contrasting the light and the darkness, capturing nature and sound. Even her secondary and tertiary characters are wrought with polish and care.The story’s leisurely pace builds its emotional cathedral one stone at a time; at about the halfway point, it becomes riveting and impossible to turn away.

This is a personal and natal undertaking for Forna, whose father, Dr. Mohamed Forna, was a dissident in Sierra Leona and was killed on trumped up charges when she was only eleven-years-old. Her non-fiction book, The Devil that Danced on the Water: A Daughter’s Quest, is the story of her search for the truth of that harrowing time. She continues her exploration of healing and recovery in this deeply researched and ambitious novel.

There are coincidences in The Memory of Love that nevertheless do not disturb the beauty or the impact of the story. In lesser hands, this may have come across as artifice. However, Forna’s characters and themes are ultimately grounded, and the patterns that emerge from the disparate stories–the unguarded moments, the link of love that ties all the characters together–transcend her intention. The potency of storytelling and the refrain of love in the aftermath of tragedy is evident and sublime in her fluent prose.

“There exists, somewhere, a scale for love invented by one of his [Adrian’s] profession…And there are others still who say love is but a beautiful form of madness.”

The injured voices of her characters mesh into a voice of hope and holding on, to a startling story of redemption. At various intervals, the lyrics of Jimmy Cliff’s “The Harder They Come” drift onto the page. It sang, I sang.

“Well, they tell me there’s a pie up in the sky…The harder they come, the harder they fall.”

Love endures. One and all.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 27 readers
PUBLISHER:	Atlantic Monthly Press (January 4, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Aminatta Forna
EXTRAS:	Diane Rehm show interview with Aminatta Forma
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: A River Called Time by Mia Couto

Bibliography:

• The Devil that Danced on the Water (2002)
• Ancestor Stones (2006)
• The Memory of Love (2010; January 2011 in US) Commonwealth Prize

Nonfiction:

• The Devil that Danced on the Water: A Daughter’s Quest (2002)

“Lots of TV is made-up pictures – like Dora’s, just a drawing – but the people, the ones with faces that look like you and me, they’re real.”

“Actual humans?”

She nods. “And the places are real too, like farms and forests and airplanes and cities…”

“Nah.” Why is she tricking me? “Where would they fit?”

“Out there,” says Ma. “Outside. ” She jerks her head back.

“Outside Bed Wall?” I stare at it.

“Outside Room.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman (SEP 18, 2010)

Emma Donoghue is not afraid of making bold choices. Her first is the narrative voice she adapts in this novel: that of five-year-old Jack, a young boy who was born and has lived his entire life in an 11-foot by 11-foot room. One might think the voice would eventually become cloying or overly precious or manipulative or downright tiring. But it never does.

Jack is an innocent, an imaginative child, whose mother was spirited away by an abductor (called Old Nick) when she was returning home from her college library. She has lived in Room ever since – for seven long years – and gave birth to Jack, the son of her abductor, within Room (a sound-proofed, lead-lined backyard shed).  And she has tried her best to fashion a life for him there, creating innovative games — from the Scream (done once a day), to Labyrinth and Fort and Bouncy Bunny. Together, Ma and Jack have created characters out of all aspects of Room – Rug, Plant, Wardrobe, Stove – watch the world on their small T.V. set, and devote every ounce of energy to each other.

The horror of this confinement is racheted up through Jack’s simplistic view of the Room, which to him, constitutes the world. He hides in Wardrobe at night and times Old Nick’s visits by counting the number of creaks in the bed. He senses when Ma is “Gone”–depressed and withdrawn — and yet can’t quite reason out why. But Ma is more attuned to the threats: she knows that as Jack ages, he is in increasing danger and that his budding curiosity will eventually cause him fatal harm.

Eventually choices are made and freedom comes, but at a cost. And when it does, Ms. Donoghue develops some bold and powerful themes: is the Room we know safer than the World Outside? Is it better to have multiple choices or just a restrictive few? Are we all confined in a Room of our making – even when we choose freedom or have it thrust upon us – or will we eventually find the strength to break out?

As Jack yearns for the security and predictability of Room, Ma tells him, “I keep messing up. I know you need me to be your ma but I’m having to remember how to be me as well at the same time…” The scariest thing for Ma is the fear that Room has obliterated who she really is. And for Jack? The scariest thing is a world without being the core of Ma’s universe.

This riveting book – a book I easily place in my Top Five of the year – goes far beyond the victim-and-survivor tale. It’s an amazing and sensitive look about a mother’s love, a study of a “stranger in a strange land,” a tale that displays the power of survival, and an indictment of a society that has lost the ability to empathize with those who are hurting (Ms. Donoghue’s wickedly humorous look at the media and its over-the-top rhetoric is reason enough to buy Room.) Most of all, it’s a careful examination of how we can take the most heinous circumstances and painstakingly extract something of beauty and value.

I cannot praise Room enough. It’s a triumph of story-telling filled with crackling dialogue, thought-provoking themes, and a page-turning quality that won’t let you stop until you reach the last page.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 2.179 readers
PUBLISHER:	Little, Brown and Company (September 13, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Emma Donoghue
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another unique narrative: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon

Bibliography:

• Stirfry (1994)
• Hood (1995)
• Kissing the Witch: Old Tales in New Skins (1997) 
• Slammerkin (2000)
• The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits: Stories (2002)
• Life Mask (2004)
• Touchy Subjects: Stories (2006)
• Landing (2007)
• The Sealed Letter (2008) Lambda
• Room (2010) Commonwealth Prize
• Astray: Stories (2012)
• Frog Music (April 2014)

Nonfiction:

• Passions Between Women: British Lesbian Culture 1668-1801 (1993)
• We Are Michael Field (1998)
• Inseparable: Desire Between Women in Literature (2010)

“Loyalty looks simple,” Grote tells him, “but it ain’t.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate (AUG 28, 2010)

This is quite simply the best historical novel I have read in years, Tolstoyan in its scope and moral perception, yet finely focused on a very particular place and time. The place: Dejima, a Dutch trading post on a man-made island in Nagasaki harbor that was for two centuries Japan’s only window on the outside world. The time: a single year, 1799-1800, although here Mitchell takes the liberties of a novelist, compressing the events of a decade, including the decline of the Dutch East India Company and Napoleon’s annexation of Holland, into a mere twelve months. He plays smaller tricks with time throughout the novel, actually, alternating between the Japanese calendar and the Gregorian one, then jumping forwards and backwards between chapters. The effect is to heighten the picture of two hermetic worlds removed from the normal course of history. One is Japan itself (the Thousand Autumns of the title), a strictly hierarchical feudal society, deliberately maintaining its isolation and culture. The other is the equally hierarchical society on Dejima itself, comprised of Dutch merchant officers, a polyglot collection of hands, and a few slaves, whose only contact with the outside world is the annual arrival of a ship from Java. To these, Mitchell adds two more hermetic worlds: an isolated mountain monastery in the second part of the book, and an English warship in the third. Without spoilers, I cannot reveal how these connect, but Mitchell’s writing will carry you eagerly from one event to the next.

The author has the rare ability to work on three narrative scales simultaneously: small, medium, and large. He immerses the reader in local details — particulars of language, culture, medical practice, philosophy and prejudice, commercial procedures, gambling, debauchery, and the capsule back-stories of the lesser characters. He will set up nail-biting situations that last a chapter or so, but introduce some twist that suddenly turns everything around at the end. And he arranges the book in three large parts, each of which ends with a transformative moral decision.

There is a large cast of of characters, whose plethora of exotic names can be confusing at first. But these crucial moments are associated with three or four who stand out for their human interest and moral dimension. Part I focuses on Jacob de Zoet (probably based on the real life Hendrik Doeff, who wrote a book about his experiences). He comes to Dejima as a lowly clerk, but he is smarter than the others, more genuinely interested in Japanese language and culture, and an incorruptible man in a nest of swindlers. Although by no means omnipresent, he serves as the commercial, political, and moral touchstone of the entire novel. Part II centers around two Japanese characters. One is the interpreter Ogawa Uzaemon, Jacob’s principal link to the Japanese world; his formal reticence conceals secrets of his own. The other is Orito Aibagawa, a young midwife who already knows more than most doctors. Despite a disfiguring burn on one cheek, she has a beauty that is hard to resist. But her importance to the book is less as a figure of romance than as the center of a moral challenge that tests her (and indirectly Ogawa) to the utmost. Part III introduces the fourth touchstone character, the British naval captain John Penhaligon, whose decisions will prove pivotal as the book approaches its climax.

Those who know David Mitchell from Cloud Atlas will be aware of his stylistic virtuosity and his fondness for channeling popular genres ranging from the nineteenth-century adventure story to dystopian futurism. There are traces of many different styles here also, but amazingly they all fit into his account of a single place and time. There are no postmodern tricks; this is Mitchell’s most straightforward novel to date. He does have a fondness for writing in short one-paragraph sentences of less than a line long, which makes some of the book look like blank verse, though it reads more like the rapid exchanges of a screenplay. Against this, he can produce set-pieces such as the opening of chapter 39, beginning thus: “Gulls wheel through spokes of sunlight over gracious roofs and dowdy thatch, snatching entrails at the marketplace and escaping over cloistered gardens, spike-topped walls and treble-bolted doors. Gulls alight on whitewashed gables, creaking pagodas, and dung-ripe stables…” And going on for a page and a half to end “…a puddle in which Magistrate Shiroyama observed the blurred reflection of gulls wheeling through spokes of sunlight. ‘This world,’ he thinks, ‘contains one masterpiece, and that is itself’.” And David Mitchell, in HIS masterpiece, gives us an entire world.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 190 readers
PUBLISHER:	Random House (June 29, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	David Mitchell
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Our review of Cloud Atlas Another MF review of The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet

Bibliography:

• Ghostwritten (1999)
• number9dream (2001)
• Cloud Atlas (2004)
• Black Swan Green (2006)
• The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (June 2010) Commonwealth Prize

“Over the balcony of the Room of Last Chrysanthemum, where a puddle from last night’s rain is evaporating; a puddle in which Magistrate Shiroyama observes the blurred reflections of gulls wheeling through spokes of sunlight. This world, he thinks, contains just one masterpiece, and that is itself.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn (JUN 30, 2010)

This is a modern, woolly mastodon of a book, a book with tusks and chewing teeth, a throwback to the most towering storytelling in literary history. But it is also a Seraph, a three-paired-winged novel that is full of zeal and respect, humility and ethereal beauty, an airborne creature that gave me five days in heaven. And, it is a sea serpent, because it lifted itself up like a column and it grabbed and swallowed me. Whole.

Pardon me while I gush; I bow to the spirit and heartbeat of David Mitchell, a force of nature who wrote this unforgettable, epic tale of adventure and colossal love. It is really…all about life and love. At turns knotty, briny, ribald, sensuous, fearsome, biting, daring, cerebral, grandiose, infinitesimal, and what did I leave out? It’s panoptic, and exquisitely poetic. The first page-and-a-half of chapter XXXIX rivals Shelley’s Hymn to Intellectual Beauty. It will make you laugh, it will make you weep, it will make your soul utter its secrets.

The novel starts with a birth, ends with a death, like bookends to all it contains. It contains two calendars, the Gregorian and the lunar. Time is an expanding and contracting entity in this story. In the strictest and most Western sense, it is linear. But when you are addressing a more Eastern orientation, as well as gestation and birth, the lunar calendar is more fitting. Mitchell makes them work, hand in hand, in alternating chapters.

The eponymous Jacob de Zoet, the Dutch Zeelander and clerk, is the strong and very moral center of this novel. Copper-haired and green-eyed, robust but reserved, he is a devout, sensitive, patient, tolerant, artistic, and keenly intelligent young man. He is sometimes troubled, and often prescient. He is posted indefinitely on the fan-shaped, artificial island of Dejima in the bay of Nagasaki with the Dutch East India Company’s warehouses and stock and motley crew, and the year is 1799.

At first sight, Jacob falls in love with Orito Aiwabaga, midwife and student to the scholarly Dr. Marinus. A burn scar on the left side of her face is no impediment to her beauty in the eyes of Jacob; his principled nature is his obstruction. I inhabited his quiet torment and pleaded with the pages to bring them together. I fell a little in love with Jacob myself–he transcended the fictional; I felt his hands.

Drawing on historical facts but twisting it into a magnificent, almost mythical tale, Mitchell casts a spell with words and images. His juxtapositions are painterly; the narrative is colorful with stylistic and linguistic leaps that keep you on your toes. This is a demanding novel. Mitchell stays one step ahead of the reader (but not arrogantly so), and he does it with brio. It is as if he is aware of what he needs to do to take you to the fathomless waters of his prose. He starts off with these tongue-slicing, lip-curling crazy names that may frustrate you initially, but it makes you slow…down…and pay attention to the minute details as well as the grand canvas.

I have rarely read a book (in third person point of view) that makes me feel so intimate with the author’s artistic strokes. It was as if he made a contract to take our senses, gradually tune us to his rhythms, and descend further and deeper. With not one stitch of self-consciousness, he envelopes you. And there are lovely sketches in the book that add dimension to the narrative.(I wish I knew who the artist was–is it Mitchell? His wife?)

There are three major shifts in the book. The first part sets up the tension and gives you the flow and rhythm and landscape of the novel, and introduces the Dutch and Japanese equipoise of politics that teeter-totters in this faraway place. The hierarchy of administrators, leaders, shoguns, samurais, medical practitioners, merchants, interpreters, servants, and slaves encompasses the serious to the sensational, and is often comically ingenious. This is also where I was most a tenant of Jacob.

The middle section focuses more on Orito, and has a feminine spirit to it, as well as cautiously moving into a thriller mode. And just when you think you got ahead of the author, he wrests that predictability away and keeps his promise to elevate his purpose.

The third section is the most challenging to read. It begins baldly but ambiguously, with a nautical saltiness that throws you off, and a gouty Captain with a morality of uncertain definition. You know where you are, but not why you are there and how it relates to the story and themes. The language is frequently idiomatic and the circumstances initially unclear. But, Mitchell doesn’t let you down. Everything gradually connects without artificial means. And the Captain’s closing thoughts stole my breath away.

This is as close to perfect as a novel can be. (You know there will be a movie–it is beautifully cinematic without being conventional.) You will close the pages, exalted. Jacob de Zoet and Orito Aibagawa will be eternally seared in your consciousness, and this story forever in your heart. A++

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 190 readers
PUBLISHER:	Random House (June 29, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	David Mitchell
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Cloud Atlas Another MF review of The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet

Bibliography:

• Ghostwritten (1999)
• number9dream (2001)
• Cloud Atlas (2004)
• Black Swan Green (2006)
• The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (June 2010) Commonwealth Prize

“There is a black-and-white photograph of a family: a man, woman, and five children. Scrawled on the back, in tight archaic script, are the words, Willow Creek, Alberta, 1933. This will be their only photograph together….

Within three years, this farm will be foreclosed. Two years later, one will die. Two others, of whom there is no photograph, will be murdered.

But this day, in the moment right after the shutter clicks shut, this family takes a deep breath and smiles.”

Book Review:

Review by Doug Bruns (SEP 11, 2009)

Under This Unbroken Sky is the story of two related families living on the prairie of Western Canada in the 1930s. They are part of the diaspora of the Ukrainian agrarian settlement to that region that began in the late 1800s and continued through the First World War.

Theo and his family settle on land leased to them by his sister Anne and her husband Stefan, who own the adjacent tract. The novel opens as Theo arrives from a two-year prison sentence in the old country after stealing grain to feed his family. It was his grain and he had been swindled out of it. His sister Anne is a rattled woman married to a drinking ex-solider of the Russian Tsar. Neither Anne nor Stefan are well suited to their new homestead life. Anne grows unhinged as the struggles of prairie existence mount; and Stefan admits to never being cut out for farm life. He longs for the city and the respect he enjoyed back home. Theo, on the other hand, is hard working and uncomplaining, as is his wife Maria. They and their five children flourish, though not without backbreaking work and hardship. They successfully settle the land. But land, as D.H. Lawrence observed, can never really be possessed, and it is the land that is the central character of this wonderful debut novel.

To this day, Ukrainian Canadians comprise the ninth largest ethic group in Canada and account for the third largest collection of Ukrainians, after Ukraine and Russia. Author Shandi Mitchell in a short essay about the story, tells us that her grandfather came to Canada from Ukraine. She relates that on her eighteenth birthday her father gave her a “bottle of whisky in a velvet pouch that he had bought the day I was born.” Then he said, “I have a secret to tell you.” I won’t divulge the secret, as it is central to the book. Shandi continues that the book is a reflection of family stories, memories and research about her grandfather,”a man who had survived a World War POW camp, Lenin, and a transatlantic crossing in steerage,” to come to Canada–”the land of dreams.” The family history settled on her and she “carried the spark of the idea for years, but I wasn’t sure whose story it was.” Later, with the work underway, she concludes, she discovered the strength of Maria, Theo’s wife.

Maria is a stalwart tough woman. She is the well-balanced core of her world, her family and their land. Contrastingly, her sister-in-law, Anne, is the turning gyre, the center that cannot hold. As one comes apart the other coalesces. Likewise the men, Theo and Stefan. As Theo digs in, literally and figuratively, Stefan flees the homestead, only to return, then flee again. There is no escaping the tension as these orbits collide. This world is deftly drawn and wonderfully applied. The families are patiently described and the characters painstakingly developed. As they are farmers, so is the story tendered, planted, watered and harvested. But, as I stated, it is the land these farmers toil over that plays central to the story. As Theo’s efforts are rewarded, so Anne and Stefan grow dependent upon his and Maria’s largesse. Ultimately, scheming and jealously prevail and Stefan orchestrates a ruse to enjoy all the fruits of Theo’s labors. But Theo is old school and not given to flexibility. This is the story of two families consumed by the land they struggle to possess. Mitchell noted in an interview that, “the landscape, for me, is a living breathing character.”

There was a school of writing a generation or two ago that admonished, Show, don’t tell. That less is more. And: Make it new, to channel Gertrude Stein. These writers were bare boned. They didn’t use adjectives and rarely hinted at what was going on in the heads of their characters. Then, later, came along a generation who, doing what upstarts do, threw out all that and gave us interior lives, thoughts and longings unspoken. They waxed and waned. And there there is the bauhaus school of thought, where form follows function. I thought a lot about all this reading While Under This Unbroken Sky. This is a stark and hard-edged novel. And the style reflects it. It reads in the best of all these traditions, but most it draws us a picture. It shows. The story is one of bare existence on the prairie and the form of the story conveys the starkness of that existence. The style is hard. You feel as if you’re walking through a field yet to be cleared of rock and boulder. For example, this passage, describing the family trying to flee a dust storm:

Maria slams the door shut. She gasps for air, her nose clogged, she coughs and spits up dirt. In her arms, Katya is quiet. She sets her on her feet, wipes the dirt from her eyes. Her thin, naked body is a mess of red splotches already turning purple.

Katya stands still, listening carefully, wondering if she has been taken to heaven or hell. “Katya.” The voice is soft. She opens her eyes. God looks like Mama.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 26 readers
PUBLISHER:	Harper (September 8, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Doug Bruns
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Shandi Mitchell
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More farm stories: A Season of Fire and Ice by Lloyd Zimbpel The God of Animals by Aryn Kyle A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley Another Ukranian Immigrant story: The History of the Tractor in Ukranian by Marian Lewycka More Canadian history: The Last Crossing by Guy Vanderhaeghe

Bibliography:

• Under This Unbroken Sky (September 2009)