“I don’t know how you can confuse drawings by Gustav Klimt with drawings by Egon Schiele. Schiele’s line jerks and cuts like a knife being dragged through flesh–his own, I suspect–whereas Klimt has fluid, caressing stroke. Schiele made a lot of interesting sketches of young girls, but wasn’t careful and eventually got himself a couple of weeks in jail. All I know is, if you let them hang around your studio and do whatever they’re forbidden to do at home, like reading a book or eating french fries or whatever, after a while they’ll relax and sprawl this way and that and now you’ve got yourself a spicy little twelve-year-old model, plus a chance at prison time.”

Book Review:

Review by Bill Brody  (JAN 19, 2014)

Renato the Painter by Eugene Mirabelli is a fictional memoir about a contemporary painter living in the Boston area. The novel starts when Renato is just days old, a foundling, and continues to the present time, when he is in his 70’s. Renato is a man with a fierce pride in his art, unrepentant sexual appetites and strong personal loyalties. He is very dissatisfied with his status in the art world, feeling that the art world has left him behind. He hasn’t had a gallery show in some time and is getting depressed about his prospects. His family life is complicated. He lives in his studio on one side of the Charles River and his wife, Alba, lives in a condo on the other side. Their relationship is passionate, but sometimes combative. Both Renato and Alba appear comfortable living separate lives. Renato has children by Alba, his wife, and by Zoe, a sometimes lover. He sees both women who know and like each other. Renato has numerous friends, mostly other artists who he meets for drinks or coffee and to bemoan the state of the current art world. His best friend died some time ago and he misses him. He’s worried about his prostate and getting old and being forgotten.

Renato is living the life of the macho painter of the 1950’s. His life is filled with exuberant sex and no less exuberant memories. He has as much time as he wants in his studio. His wife, Alba, lives on the other side of the river, available for occasional sex, for good food, thoughtful advice and being a good mother. He regularly sees Zoe, one of his former lovers, with whom he has a child. Alba, Zoe and all their children know each other and are comfortable with the complicated family. Renato, for all his complaints about lack of recognition, appears to have no real financial worries. He gets to paint, to worry to his heart’s content, and to enjoy the love, lust and affection of others. His social life with other male artists is his chance to enjoy complaining about the sorry state of current art affairs.

Renato is in his 70’s, and the time is supposed to be now, but he graduated at 17 from High School in 1948, so he would be 82 or 83 today. His voice reminds me of artists I have met who would be in their 80’s today. The voice of his youth fits with the 1930’s. The novel captures that period well, and pretty accurately captures the voice of artists I knew in 2000, when they were then in their 70’s. His voice recalls the romantic machismo of the Beats, the abstract expressionists and their artistic progeny. There is an authentic ring to how he speaks about art and life, but it is somewhat anachronistic.

I found the book very enjoyable, although the last part rambles a bit. Renato is someone I would have liked to meet. I hear his voice loud and clear, but I can’t quite see the paintings. I understand Renato’s fears of ageing and dying unknown; his glorification of sexuality; and his artistic idealism. Peaceful coexistence within the complicated family is a bit implausible, but consistent with the myth of the bohemian artist.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 5 readers
PUBLISHER:	McPherson (May 14, 2012)
REVIEWER:	Bill Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Eugene Mirabelli
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More on painters / artists: The Painter of Battles by Arturo Perez-Reverte Orchard by Larry Watson

Bibliography:

• The Burning Air (1959)
• The Way In (1968)
• No Resting Place (1972)
• The World at Noon (1994)
• The Language Nobody Speaks (1999)
• The Passion of Terri Heart (2004)
• The Goddess in Love with a Horse (2008)
• Renato The Painter (2012)

“She says nothing but stares hard at her husband. She presses a palm to her jaw, though any attempt to stop the vibration is useless. Put it back, George. Put it back. And then you stay. You’ve got no heart for any of this, anyway.

He takes a deep breath, exhales, then tilts his head back and breathes again as though the oxygen he needs were at a height he can’t quite reach. Closed up like this the house can’t take in the sun’s heat, and whiskey won’t help with the chill of an empty house. George refolds the towel, then picks up the bundle.

I’ll pack the tent, he says. Mildew smell and all.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shultman  (DEC 31, 2013)

The simple plotting of Larry Watson’s Let Him Go – the quest of Margaret and George Blackridge to reclaim their young grandson, who lives with his mother and rotten-to-the-core stepfather – belies the strong emotional impact of this exquisitely powerful book.

The power sneaks up on the reader when it is least expected – in a snatch of dialogue, a perceptive insight, a small detail that turns everything around. Larry Watson is a master of breathing life into his characters through ordinary conversations and actions that hint at extraordinary revelations that bubble right beneath the surface.

The story takes place in Dalton, North Dakota in 1951 in what some people refer to as the “real America” – a place where people don’t waste words, where hard work and straight talk is respected, and where the people and the land are reliant on each other. Their grown son met with tragedy, and Margaret prevails upon her taciturn husband to travel to Gladstone, Montana to find his namesake Jimmy…a boy who has been caught in the web of his stepfather’s violent Weboy family.

Larry Watson walks a delicate tightrope; what he doesn’t reveal is every bit as meaningful as what he describes. Is the long and tender marriage of Margaret and George more complex than it appears? What were they like as parents to their twins – James, who is now dead, and Janie, who is estranged from them? Does raising Jimmy give them the right to another chance?

Along the way, there are brutal surprises and heartbreaks and words so true they cause the reader to gasp at their validity. Take this, for example: “A four-year-old has so little past, and he remembers almost none of it, neither the father he once had nor the house where he once lived. But he can feel the absences – and feel them as sensation, like a texture that was once at his fingers every day but now is gone and no matter how he gropes or reaches his hand he cannot touch what’s no longer there.”

At the end of the day, Let Him Go is about what’s worth fighting for and what’s worth sacrificing for along this rocky road of life. Gutsy, authentic, and downright riveting, it’s a book that succeeds at blurring that thin barrier between fiction and the outside world. Quite simply, it’s hard to believe that these characters are anything but 100% real.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 31 readers
PUBLISHER:	Milkweed Editions (September 3, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shultman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Larry Watson
EXTRAS:	Book Trailer with excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Orchard

Bibliography:

• In a Dark Time (1980)
• Montana 1948 (1993)
• Justice (1996)*
• White Crosses (1997)
• Laura (1999)
• Orchard (2003)
• Sundown, Yellow Moon (2007)
• American Boy (2011)
• Let Him Go (September 2013)

*Justice is a prequel to Montana 1948

I know that I can no longer reach her.

I know that, should I try to reach her–should I take her hand as if she were again sitting next to me in the upstairs cabin on the evening Pan Am from Honolulu to LAX, should I lull her to sleep against my shoulder, should I sing her the song about Daddy gone to get the rabbit skin to wrap his baby bunny in–she will fade from my touch.

Vanish.

Book Review:

Review by Doug Bruns  (NOV 10, 2011)

Blue Nights is ostensibly about the loss of a child. In reality, however, it is about the passing of time. Indeed, it is the passing of time that captures all loss, loss of children, of loved ones, and ultimately, of self. It is the classic Heritclitian flow and Ms. Didion has here given herself to it fully, embracing every ripple, bend and eddy. With superhuman strength she resists fighting the current. She does not emote. She does not wax sentimental. Rather she turns her hard-edged and beautiful prose squarely upon her subject matter–as she always has done–and sets to work. Yet even she wonders if the manner in which she practices her art is up for the task. Halfway through the book she wrestles with the question: “What if the absence of style that I welcomed at one point–the directness that I encouraged, even cultivated–what if this absence of style has now taken on a pernicious life of its own?” How can one write about the loss of a child with prose chiseled from tempered steel?

How does one make sense of it, bestow order where there is but chaos, the losses, the aging and the attendant frailty?. How does the writer rise to this? She exhibits no pretension, no artifice. There is that line, repeated throughout her previous memoir, A Year of Magical Thinking: “She’s a pretty cool customer.” Never did anyone seem so cool than the writer does here. She is a reporter, a cool and trained observer, even when she is her own subject matter. Yet she is laid bare. “When I tell you that I am afraid to get up from a folding chair in a rehearsal room…” she writes, noting her infirmities, “is this what I am actually saying? Does it frighten me?”

Yet, she is present, bold and unflinching. She is serious. We can ask for nothing more, and at times wish she would hold back–a trait, I would wager, of which she is not capable. In characteristic Didion fashion she brings her steely eye and razor-precise prose to her subjects: the loss of her daughter Quintana Roo, and, unflinchingly, her advancing inescapable personal extinction. Her narrative is peppered with bits of her childhood, her fading friendships, the loss of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and the adoption (March 1966) of Quintana. All this reflected against the backdrop of growing old. It is all loss.

“When we lose that sense of the possible we lose it fast,” she writes.

Early in the book, reflecting on the loss of her daughter, she wonders, “Had she no idea how much we needed her?” When I first read this–it is a sentence repeated throughout, like a mantra–when I first read this my mind filled in the blanks quickly rushing ahead. My mind read, Had she no idea how much we loved her? I stumbled over the word need and had to reread the sentence. Was love too strong an emotion to bring to the page, I wondered? Or was she saying something else? A few pages later, while remembering the adoption of the infant Quintana, she asks, “…what if I fail to love this baby?” (Her italics.) Only here will love appear as a doubt-filled question.

Late in the book she finds herself in the hospital. She had awakened in the night on the floor of her bedroom, lying in a pool of blood. “It seemed clear that I had fallen, but I had no memory of falling, no memory whatsoever of losing balance, trying to regain it, the usual preludes to a fall. Certainly I had no memory of losing consciousness.” The event, however, is not the point. The point is the question of who to contact in case of emergency. “Whole days now spent on this one question, this question with no possible answer: who do I want notified in case of emergency?” (Her italics.) She goes through the lists of people, possible candidates. But there are problems. They live elsewhere, or are out of the country, or aren’t someone with whom she wants to share such intimacy. Or are gone. Ultimately she concludes, “Only one person needs to know.” And then the bookend to Had she no idea how much we needed her? “She is of course the one person who needs to know.” And she is gone.

It is the intertwined nature of family and friendship, of life itself, on display here. The denouement comes in the fashion in which it all unravels, how fast the end arrives and the struggle of the observer, the chronicler–indeed, the mother–to survive. As she confesses at the book’s end: “The fear is for what is still to be lost.”

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 21 readers
PUBLISHER:	Knopf (November 1, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Doug Bruns
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Joan Didion
EXTRAS:	Powerful Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Year of Magical Thinking

Bibliography:

• Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968)
• The White Album (1979)
• Salvador (1983)
• Miami (1987)
• After Henry (1992)
• Political Fictions (2001)
• Where I Was From (2003)
• The Year of Magical Thinking (2005) 
• We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live (2006) (first seven previous books in one)
• Blue Nights (November 2011)

Fiction

• Run, River (1963)
• Play It As It Lays (1970)
• A Book of Common Prayer (1977)
• Democracy (1984)
• The Last Thing He Wanted (1996)

“The sunlight didn’t miss its chance, and as we approached the first high point of the ride, it moved in behind a brassy cloud high above the river, and then suddenly, like a very thunderstorm of light, dropped a cascade of brightness the size of Ireland down on the water, so that the river halved into brightness and brilliance, and you would half suspect that there was a more mysterious ticketman somewhere, from the mountains of heaven, pulling heavenly switches.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  (SEP 18, 2011)

So here I was yesterday, pounding my treadmill, reading Sebastian Barry’s new novel, alternately sobbing and laughing aloud at the sheer magnificence of it, reveling in the exuberant brilliance of his writing. Admittedly, exertion at the gym calls forth such strong reactions, but the book had touched me quietly already with its first pages upon waking, and would retain its hold through the limpid ambiguity of its final paragraphs, read before going very late to bed. Yes, I finished it in a single day; I could not help myself. But there were many passages that I went back to reread more slowly and then more slowly still, just to savor the magic of Barry’s style.

The paragraph quoted above, coming almost halfway through the book, is the opening of a magnificent set piece, when Irish expatriate Lily Dunne and a fellow servant are taken by an admirer to ride their first-ever big dipper in Luna Park in Cleveland. “We poised, three beating hearts, three souls with all their stories so far in the course of ordinary lives, three mere pilgrims, brilliantly unknown, brilliantly anonymous, above a Cleveland fun park, with the wonderful catastrophe of the sunlight on the river, the capricious engineering of the tracks, the sudden happiness of knowing Joe…”. So begins a two-page paragraph, all in a single sentence, as the poise and the rush and the joy and the terror, laughing and crying all at the same time, becomes the pivot point for an entire life.

As indeed it is. “What is the sound of an eighty-nine-year-old heart breaking?” asks the second sentence in the book. Grief-stricken at the death of her grandson Bill, Lily wants only to write down her own memories, or make her confession as she calls it, before putting a quiet end to her own life too. Each chapter, headed simply “First Day without Bill” and so on, tells us a little bit about her present life and a lot about her past, until eventually the two meet up. She is living in the Hamptons, in a small cottage fixed up for her by her former employer for whom she worked as cook. Her memories take her back to the age of four, in the early years of the last century, when her father was a senior police officer in Dublin. Associated with the wrong side, unfortunately, for in the struggles for Irish independence, Lily and her fiancé are forced to flee to America with a price on their heads. The “Canaan’s Side” of the old hymn, the near bank of the Promised Land after the crossing of the Red Sea, is of course the USA, where Lily and her lover are forced to lead a fringe existence under assumed names. It will be long before she will feel herself truly American — the fun-park ride is a first hint of it — but she ends up surrounded by caring, tactful people who respect and even love her.

Here I get stuck. In revealing that the dead Bill was Lily’s grandson, I already anticipate something that Barry will reveal in his own good time, though only a dozen pages into the book. But his technique of adding facts only when truly important does make it very difficult to say any more about the plot. Suffice it to say that it will take Lily from the bloodshed of the Troubles in Ireland to an America moving from the heady Twenties through the Depression and several wars. All the men in Lily’s life will be touched by war, from the First World War that killed her beloved elder brother Willie to the First Gulf War that so affected her grandson Bill. The assassinations of the Sixties will also play a part, bringing to the surface issues of race that had been a dormant subtext from quite early on. I am not convinced that Barry can quite manage to sustain the story over such a long span; there are some chapters about two-thirds of the way through when the intensity flags somewhat, and a couple of revelations towards the end stretch credulity a little. But his ability to balance the epic with the intimate, as the book jacket rightly claims, is nonetheless amazing.

All Barry’s books begin, at least in back-story, at roughly the same place, with the agonized birth of the Irish state; he seems to extend the story further in time and place with each one. A Long Way (about Lily’s brother) addresses the paradox of Irish soldiers fighting for their country in Flanders only to be treated as traitors at home (a point which Barry gently parallels to the plight of Vietnam veterans here). The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty and The Secret Scripture follow the legacy of those conflicted loyalties deeper into the twentieth century, as does Annie Dunne, about Lily’s sister in the Fifties. On Canaan’s Side extends the story across the Atlantic, though it turns out to be more about America than Ireland, except in the marvelous poetry of the Irish voice. The Secret Scripture showed Barry’s remarkable ability to get into the mind of a very old woman, and that is one of the true joys of this book too. For what might have turned into a despairing wail of grief becomes instead a tapestry of light and wonder. I will let Lily have the final word:

“And I notice again in the writing of this confession that there is nothing called long-ago after all. When things are summoned up, it is all present time, pure and simple. So that, much to my surprise, people I have loved are allowed to live again. What it is that allows them I don’t know. I have been happy now and then in the last two weeks, the special happiness that is offered from the hand of sorrow.”

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 68 readers
PUBLISHER:	Viking Adult (September 8, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Sebastian Barry
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Netherland by Joseph O’Neill

Bibliography:

• Mackers Garden (1982)
• The Engine of Owl-Light (1987)
• The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty (1998)
• Annie Dunn (2002)
• A Long Long Way (2005)
• The Secret Scripture (2008)
• On Canaan’s Side (2011)
• The Temporary Gentleman (May 2014)

“The porch was unpainted and its wood bleached to a silvery white. When the sky filled with clouds, it often turned the same silver color as the wood, so that it only seemed missing a grain to be wood and the wood only missing a breath of wind to stir it and turn it into sky.”

Book Review:

Review by Doug Bruns  (MAY 27, 2011)

I can honestly say that I have not read a book so evocative of place and time since reading anything by Faulkner.

“Nearly seventy years before George died, his father, Howard Aaron Crosby, drove a wagon for his living. It was a wooden wagon. It was a chest of drawers mounted on two axles and wooden spoked wheels. There were dozens of drawers, each fitted with a recessed brass ring, pulled open with a hooked forefinger, that contained brushes and wood oil, tooth powder and nylon stockings, shaving soap and straight-edge razors.”

See what I mean?

Tinkers picks up eight days before George Washington Crosby, a New England patriarch, expires. He is lying on a hospital bed in his living room, “right where they put the dining room table, fitted with its two extra leaves for holiday dinners.” He is surrounded by the antique clocks he collected and repaired, each tick-tock a motion closer to oblivion. His family, like his consciousness, comes and goes. He built the house in which he now rests. “The cracks in the ceiling widened into gaps. The locked wheels of his bed sank into new fault lines opening in the oak floor beneath the rug. At any moment the floor was going to give.” As he dies, the house and room dissolve, family members disappear. His fragile consciousness returns him to the hardscrabble existence of his upbringing in New England.

George’s father, Howard, was a tinker and traveling salesman. He plied his trade in the backwoods of Maine. He had a hard life. He was epileptic. Upon learning that his cold-hearted wife is going to have him institutionalized, he abandons his family, leaving George and his siblings. “His despair came from the fact that his wife saw him as a fool, as a useless tinker, a copier of bad verse from two-penny religious magazines, an epileptic, and could find no reason to turn her head and make him into something better.” The event–the abandonment–haunts and plagues George to his last breath. “…personal mysteries,” he thinks, “like where is my father, why can’t I stop all the moving and look out over the vast arrangements and find by the contours and colors and qualities of light where my father is, not to solve anything but just simply even to see it again one last time, before what, before it ends, before it stops. But it doesn’t stop; it simply ends.”

A good reviewer worth his or her salt, would not, should not, pad a review with so much lifting of prose, so many passages directly rendered. But I cannot help myself. The writing in this compact little book is so taut it hums like a drawn bowstring. The reader wonders, how such tension can so artfully be sustained? But sustained it remains, each paragraph more precisely constructed than the previous one.

Tinkers is Paul Harding’s first novel. The publisher, Bellevue Literary Press, had only been in business a couple of years when they brought it to market. The New York Times did not review the book, it being so far off the radar. (“Every now and then a good book completely passes us by,” Gregory Cowles wrote in the Arts section, a full year after publication.) It won the Pulitzer. Deservedly so. At a time when a thinking person might despair over the crassness and commercialization of, well, of virtually everything that matters, one finds hope and its reward in the tale of such talent realized. Indeed, all is not lost.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 331 readers
PUBLISHER:	Bellevue Literary Press (January 1, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Doug Bruns
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Paul Harding
EXTRAS:	Excerpt UWIRE interview with Paul Harding
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More Pulitzer Prize winners: Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Bibliography:

• Tinkers (2009)
• Enon (September 2013)

“It was frightening, though, how little time you got. You only became yourself when you were twenty-three or twenty-four. A few years later, you had an old man’s chest hair. It wasn’t worth it.”

Book Review:

Review by Guy Savage  (MAY 15, 2011)

The thirteen stories in the collection Bullfighting from Irish author Roddy Doyle examine various aspects of male middle age. Eight of these stories first appeared in New Yorker, and in this volume the post-boom stories collectively offer a wry, bittersweet look at the years past and the years yet to come. We see middle-aged men whose wives have left them, middle-aged men whose children have grown and gone, stale marriages, marriages which have converted lovers into friends, the acceptance of disease and aging, and the ever-looming aspect of mortality. Lest I give the wrong impression, these stories are not depressing–instead through these marvellous stories Doyle argues that middle age brings new experiences and new emotions–just when we thought we’d experienced all that life had to offer.

In “The Photograph,” Martin tallies up the pros and cons of aging:

“Getting older wasn’t bad. The balding suited Martin. Everyone said it. He’d had to change his trouser size from 34 to 36. It had been a bit of a shock, but it was kind of nice wearing loose trousers again, hitching them up when he stood up to go to the jacks, or whatever. He was fooling himself; he knew that. But that was the point—he was fooling himself. He’d put on weight, but he felt a bit thinner.”

As Martin faces his first serious health issue, he recalls the recent death of Noel, a friend from his youth. Martin tries valiantly to make light of his own health problem with mixed success.

In “Funerals,” middle-aged son, Bill starts ferrying his elderly parents around to funerals. What begins as a one-off favour turns into a weekly habit. Bill discovers that his parents actually look forward to funerals and that they view them as outings to be followed by a trip to the chip shop. Instead of feeling burdened by becoming their regular chauffeur, Bill finds himself fascinated by their behaviour and pleasantly comfortable in their company, yet at the same time some sort of seismic shift has occurred in the relationship:?

“He could enjoy their company and listen to them flirting. They weren’t his parents any more; he wasn’t their son. He was a middle-aged man in a car with two people who were a bit older. Once or twice, in a rush that made him hang onto the steering wheel, he was their son and the car was full of himself as a boy and a stupid, awkward young man, hundreds of boys and men, all balled into this one man driving his wife’s Toyota Corolla and trying not to cry.”

Bill isn’t sure why he wants to spend so much time with his parents, but he does know that he’s beginning to feel uncomfortable with his own crowd:

“He stayed clear of the local funerals, the old neighbours. He didn’t want the conversations. What are you up to these days? How many kids is it you have? He didn’t want to talk to men he’d once known who’d lost their jobs so recently they still didn’t understand it. Great, great. Yourself? There’d be too many middle-aged women who used to be girls, ponytailed men he used to play with, a mother he’d fancied–in the coffin. Fat grannies he’d kissed and–the last time he’d gone to one of the local ones–a woman with MS, shaking her way to a seat in the church, the first girl he’d ever had sex with.”

Bill finds his parents child-like, and there’s a comforting sensation to the day trips he takes with them as they attend funeral after funeral. It’s as though Bill is a parent once again–after all his own children are grown and no longer need his care.

If I had to pick one favourite story in this stellar collection, it would be “Animals.” In this particularly poignant story, George, the middle-aged narrator, whose children are now grown and gone, recalls his life as a family man through memories of the animals the family owned. At one point, George tells how he once colluded with the local pet shop, Wacker’s over a lost canary. The canary, Pete, escaped from the cage, and George returns home to find “four hysterical children in the kitchen, long past tears and snot, and a woman outside in the back garden, talking to the hedge.” The woman is George’s wife, Sandra and she’s pretending that the canary is in the hedge:

“–Listen, he said.—I’m going to bring the kids to Wacker’s, to see if Pete flew there. Are you with me?
Sandra looked at him. And he knew: she was falling in love with him, all over again. Or maybe for the first time—he didn’t care. There was a woman in her dressing gown, looking attractively distraught, and she was staring at George like he was your man from ER.

–While I’m doing that, said George,–you phone Wacker’s and tell him the story. You with me?
–Brilliant.
–It might work.”

Some people measure their lives by the holidays they’ve taken, the jobs they’ve held, or the homes they’ve lived in, but George measures his life as a husband and father through the family pets. Perhaps, under the circumstances, it’s no surprise that middle-aged George finds that his loyal companion is a dog.

The stories include some gentle humour as we hear of one man who brags about picking up 57-old-twins. Another story tells of a couple whose relationship devolves into insult slinging (“Four decades of arse parked inside a piece of string”) in some sort of aging contest. Doyle’s characters, while sketched lightly, are fully realized individuals who cope with the various problems and disappointments of middle age: loneliness, illness, failure, and boredom. These stories examine middle-aged life from all angles, so we also see that middle-age is a mixed bag with consolations in unexpected places. Bullfighting, a rich mature collection from Doyle, shows us a writer at the top of his game, and Doyle’s stories are infused with generosity and wisdom–even as they examine, so excellently, the foibles of human nature.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 2 readers
PUBLISHER:	Viking Adult (April 28, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Guy Savage
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Roddy Doyle Wikipedia page on Roddy Doyle
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Dead Republic Paula Spencer

Bibliography:

• Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (1993)
• Wilderness (2007)
• The Deportees: and Other Stories (2008)
• Not Just for Christmas ( 2008)
• Bullfighting: Stories (2011)

Barrytown Trilogy:

• The Commitments (1987)
• The Snapper (1990)
• The Van (1991)

The Last Roundup Trilogy:

• A Star Called Henry (1999)
• Oh. Play That Thing! (2004)
• The Dead Republic (2010)

Paula Spencer Novels:

• The Women Who Walked Into Doors (1996)
• Paula Spencer (2006)

Children’s Books:

• The Giggler Treatment (2000)
• Rover Saves Christmas (2001)
• Meanwhile Adventures (2006)
• Her Mother’s Face (2008)
• A Grey Hound Girl (May 2012)

Nonfiction:

• Rory and Ita (2002)

Movies from books:

• The Commitments (1991)
• The Snapper (1993)
• The Van (1997)

“And for himself the future held little more than the grim routines that had always sustained him, together with the hope that they would sustain him to the end. Then it would be time to rely on the kindness of strangers, and the hope that this would prove more than a fond illusion.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn (JUL 26, 2010)

Anita Brookner is arguably one of the finest prose writers living today. Her keen precision and clean, stark sentences are edged with luminous turns of phrase and biting ironies. Her characters lead insular, lonely lives and rarely do anything optimistic with their existence, no matter how astute their insight.

Retired banker Paul Sturgis is no exception. He is 72 years old and lives a tightly circumscribed life. There is minimal pleasure in his activities, such as frequenting art museums, occasional travel around Europe, visiting his hairdresser, and his obligatory sojourns to a distant relative, Helena. Walking is his favorite activity, and it is during his perambulations that he examines his life in detail.

Paul is in constant conflict with himself. When he meets a woman in Venice, Vicky Gardner, he alternately can’t wait to escape her and get to know her better. When they meet up again in London, he allows her to manipulate him and leave her belongings at his house, while she takes off for parts unknown.

Paul has an ex-flame, Sarah, who was exuberant and sensual. After years of separation, they have a chance encounter and renew their bond, but it is one of friendship, not romance. Her health is declining, although her tongue is as astringent as ever. Paul entertains longings and fantasies of marrying Sarah, but he knows it is illusory. She is reproachful and inscrutable, and he cannot conquer the walls between them.

Paul is one of those neurotics whose basic mantra toward others would be, “I would die to have you, and kill you to get away.” He is a passive man who has never been able to negotiate strong women, although he admires them. He is in perpetual battle with his own desires, and his contradictory thoughts are often serially juxtaposed, one warring thought after another. That is part of Brookner’s wit and wisdom, her almost-aching but caustic acumen into human psychology.

The drawback of this story is its torpor. Although the author has an infinite supply of description and inner dialogue for Paul’s endless indecision and confusion, it begins to wear on the reader. It becomes repetitious, irritating, monotonous. Eventually, it devolves into a long-winded soliloquy. In lesser hands, I wouldn’t have even finished it. But Brookner’s magic with language kept me hanging to the bitter end. This would have worked better as a novella, reducing the pages by half.

I am a sturdy fan of Anita Brookner, and because of my familiarity with her work, I remained fastened to the narrative. I will read her for the scintillating prose, for her intoxicating metaphors. If you are unfamiliar with her work, start with her Booker winner Hotel du Lac, her shattering Look At Me, or her stunning Brief Lives.  Brookner’s elegiac prowess captivates with her story and character in most of her novels. But Strangers is not her finest achievement, nor one I would highly recommend to other readers.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 19 readers
PUBLISHER:	Vintage (July 13, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Anita Brookner
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt Hillary Mantel‘s review of Strangers
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	If you like this author, you may also like :Penelope Lively John Banville Anita Shreve Alison Lurie

Bibliography:

• The Debut (1981) (UK title: A Start in Life)
• Providence (1982)
• Look at Me (1983)
• Hotel du Lac (1984) 
• Family and Friends (1985)
• A Misalliance (1986)
• A Friend from England (1987)
• Latecomers (1988)
• Lewis Percy (1989)
• Brief Lives (1990)
• A Closed Eye (1991)
• Fraud (1992)
• Dolly (1993) (UK Title: A Family Romance)
• A Private View (1994)
• Incidents in the Rue Laugier (1995)
• Altered States (1996)
• Visitors (1997)
• Falling Slowly (1998)
• Undue Influence (1999)
• The Bay of Angels (2001)
• Making Things Better (2002) (UK Title: The Next Big Thing)
• The Rules of Engagement (2003)
• Leaving Home (2005)
• Strangers (2009)

“A man is anxious because he has lost too much time and has ended up thinking about all he should have thought about when he had the time.”

Book Review:

Review by Doug Bruns (JUL 18, 2010)

This book unsettled me. Its rendering of a mind descending (drifting? decaying?) into an Alzheimerian abyss is frightening in its deft, almost poetic, description. Indeed, it is disarming in its expanding degrees of what is normal to what is irrevocably and silently lost. If you worry about Alzheimer’s–and who cannot but worry–or have experienced it in your family, the tale told in The Wilderness, the story of Lincolnshire (England) architect Jake Jameson, will stun you. Simply and frighteningly stun you.

Do not be put-off by my comments. This is not a horror show. Rather this the tracing of a gentle clear mountain stream as it winds and falls its way to complete and utter otherness, the wilderness of the ocean where the river is lost forever. This is a meditation on memory and what they–indeed, we ourselves–consist of. If we are the accumulation of experience stored as shards called memories, what do we become as those shards are lost? It is the opposing Proustian, equally philosophical, question. In this instance Jake’s memories move and resist pattern and ultimately are never the same twice. He cannot escape the flow, for this is his world, what he has in fact become. For example, his daughter Alice. She has come to town to visit him with her boyfriend, the poet. At least he thinks it is Alice. He remembers her childhood and how he and his wife struggled to conceive her and one thought leads to another, tumbling. Alice tells him she is pregnant. And then, later, while looking through a photo album with a man he thinks he should know (the reader is not sure either), Jake sees a photo: “In this one there is a child in a white bed, and he recognizes the open, empty features on their way somewhere, but perhaps lost….and he wants to take the series of tubes and machines from the bed so that she can be comfortable.” We learn from an observer: “Oh, dear Alice,” the woman says. ‘She had been in hospital for such a long time, look how tiny she is.” And finally: “This was just a few days before she died.” So who was the pregnant woman who visited him? Or was that just a jumbled memory? Who did that memory belong to? Similarly, their is the fate of his wife, Helen. Did she have a stroke or fall from a ladder? Further, there is a recurring gunshot through the novel, the piercing crack of a round being fired. Was someone shot? Wounded or killed? But it never resolves, like a memory that cannot be pinned down. These threads interweave and the reader cannot see the tapestry from which they are unraveling. Nor can Jake. We are in his world.

There is a masterly technical aspect to this book which unsettles the reader. At times one becomes, like Jake, lost in “the wilderness” that is Jake’s mind. The text becomes the disorienting individual experience. Memories come and go like a breeze through a empty house, from everywhere and from nowhere in particular. You experience this one and then another washes over you. It is a device that puts the reader on the same unsteady footing as the protagonist. My wife read this book before I did. When I finished we compared notes. It was remarkable how we each experienced the book in a different fashion. She held to some narrative, like a snippet of memory, and I dismissed the same snippet to hold another in its place. For instance, there is a woman in the novel, Joy, the daughter of a family friend. We cannot trust Jake’s recollection of what did or did not happen between he and Joy. While I was convinced of one rendering, my wife subscribed to another. And both were correct. Or both wrong. There was no definitive conclusion. If this were music it would suggest two–or more–contrapuntal melodies interweaving but never resolving. Instead the listener is left not knowing, struggling with emptiness. “One must always fight back, not in the hope of winning but just to delay the moment of losing,” thinks Jake, battling the ensuing emptiness. It is a struggle we participate in.

Early on in the novel Jake, going to his retirement celebration, pulls off the road. He “lifts his glasses, and rubes his eyes. He has been doing this journey to and from work every day for thirty-five years. He pores over the map.” We all know the feeling of forgetting for a moment that very thing we think is most secure in our memory. Nothing to worry about, we console ourselves. But like rocks being laid, the weight grows steadily, but grows nonetheless. A few pages later, “he failed to notice…the confusion, the clotting of thoughts, disorientation….” And so the rocks are laid one atop the other, until ever so naturally, a few hundred pages later, Jake is sitting with people he does not know, but thinks he should, looking at a photo album filled with images of people he does not recognize. And then the last sentence: “He grips the hand that has found his, opens his eyes, and walks on.” How did this happen? you ask. How did he get to that place. But you know, because you, the reader, walked along with him from quiet forgetfulness to disorientation, loss of memory, confusion and finally, heartbreakingly, blind resignation.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 27 readers
PUBLISHER:	Anchor; 1 edition (April 6, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Doug Bruns
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Samantha Harvey
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another Alzheimer victim: Lost by Alice Lichtenstein

Bibliography:

• The Wilderness (February 2009)

“We are all small-minded people, creeping about the earth grubbing for our own advantage and making the very mistakes for which we want to humiliate our neighbors…. I think we wake up every day with high intentions and by dusk we have routinely fallen short.”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowsky (MAR 5, 2010)

There is a great deal to like in Helen Simonson’s debut novel, Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, whose protagonist is sixty-eight year old widower Major Ernest Pettigrew. The Major, who lives in a small English village named Edgecombe St. Mary, occasionally plays golf with his cronies, dines at the club, and is well-respected among the townspeople. Still, something is missing. He still remembers his late wife, Nancy, with longing, and he derives small solace from the indifferent ministrations of his only son, Robert, a self-centered social climber who has acquired a forthright and droll American girlfriend named Sandy. When Pettigrew hears of his younger brother’s death, he is overcome with grief, although the two had not seen each other much of late.

Unexpectedly, the widowed local shopkeeper, Mrs. Jasmina Ali, drops by on an errand, and when she learns that the Major’s brother has died, she kindly offers her assistance. Gradually, the two become friends and are surprised to learn that they are both devoteés of classic literature. Mrs. Ali and the Major make every effort to keep their budding relationship under wraps to prevent their hidebound neighbors from gossiping. Still, other events that neither could have foreseen threaten to separate them.

Simonson’s premise is wonderful, and Pettigrew is a lovely character who reminds us that old age is not a disease. Although the Major suffers from insomnia, is not as quick as he once was, and may be a tad forgetful, he can still shoot, play a round of golf, and is capable of harboring romantic feelings for a lovely and sensitive woman. Jasmina, who is fifty-eight, is attached to her family. She is also proud, intelligent, and independent, a perfect match for the major. The dialogue is bright and witty, the descriptive writing vivid, and certain satirical passages are laugh-out-loud funny. There are engrossing subplots that deal with a bitter single mother, a set of valuable sporting guns, an arrogant nephew, and Robert’s tireless efforts to be accepted by men of wealth and influence. However, the themes that resonate most are that grown children should not dictate to their parents; there is no room for prejudice in a civilized society; and, in a small town, it is impossible to stop busybodies from wagging their tongues and shaking their fingers.

This would have been an even more successful novel had Simonson shortened it by fifty pages or so and maintained a consistently lighthearted tone throughout. Alas, she allows a few melodramatic touches to mar the ending, which is a bit convoluted and protracted. Still, most of Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand is a genuine delight and a moving tribute to the principles that many espouse, but few adhere to: We should make a genuine effort to treat our elders with respect; to be open-minded about people’s differences; to remember that good manners never go out of style; and to recognize that lasting romantic love is based not only on physical attraction, but also on shared interests and genuine affection. It is refreshing to see Mrs. Ali stand tall and declare, “I will rule my own life, thank you.”

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 184 readers
PUBLISHER:	Random House; 1 edition (March 2, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Eleanor Bukowsky
AMAZON PAGE:	Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Helen Simonson
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another “widower” novel: A Short History of Tractors in Ukranian by Marina Lewycka

Bibliography:

• Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand (March 2010)

“You don’t see them at first. Then suddenly a random detail snags your attention like a stray mouse: an old lady’s handbag, a stocking slipping down a leg, bunching up on a bulging ankle, crocheted gloves on the hands, a little old-fashioned hat perched on the head, sparse grey hair with a blue sheen.”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte (FEB 3, 2010)

Baba Yaga is a star player in Eastern European myths. The Russian version involves a crackly old witch ready to spark terror in children’s hearts. Croatian author Dubravka Ugresic, in her wonderful book, Baba Yaga Laid an Egg, lays out modern-day interpretations of this age-old myth.

These “witches,” Ugresic tells us, are all around us—old women limbs curling from arthritis, shuffling along, waiting, pondering the end of their lives. The book is laid out in three sections—each a different take on the myth.

The first one touchingly details the relationship between an old woman and her daughter (the narrator). Living in exile in Zagreb, the old lady spends each of her days with fixed routines—a treat at the local pastry shop, a glance at the newspaper, dusting perhaps. Ugresic does such a brilliant job detailing this woman’s every action and gesture as she waits slowly for death to come, that the book is worth reading for this alone. “She uttered her truisms with special weight,” the narrator writes of her mother, “Truisms gave her the feeling, I suppose, that everything was fine, that the world was precisely where it should be, that she was in control and had the power to decide.”

Plagued by dementia partly from old age and partly from cancer that has spread to the brain and is barely contained, her one regret is not being able to see the city of her youth ever again. “She had snapped shut almost all of her emotional files. One of them was slightly open: it was Varna, the city of her childhood and youth.” Since she is not capable of travel, Mom sets the daughter off to find and record the city of her youth.

Some background information about the author would be relevant here. Dubravka Ugresic now lives in Amsterdam with a Dutch passport. When war broke out in Croatia in the early 90’s she took a stand against the nationalistic government for which she was forced out of the country as part of a “witch hunt.” An exile herself, you can detect the emotional weight of Ugresic’s own experiences here. In the story, when the narrator returns to her mother with pictures of her hometown now irrevocably changed, the mother can no longer recognize it. It’s a haunting and moving portrait not just of old age, but also of exile’s deep loneliness.

The second interpretation looks at three old women—Beba, Pupa and Kukla—who visit a newly founded spa retreat as part of their joint vacation together. The friends kick it up and have a good time even as the story individually zooms in on each woman’s life regrets.

To each of these women, love doesn’t (or hasn’t) come easy. The “egg” in the title too is based on a Russian folktale and it stands for love—one that is nearly inaccessible. “Love is on the distant shore of a wide sea,” goes the legend. “A large oak tree stands there, and in the tree there is a box, in the box a rabbit, in the rabbit a duck, and in the duck an egg. And the egg in order to get the emotional mechanism going, had to be eaten.”

So even if “Baba Yaga” has laid an egg, will it get eaten and by whom? In here Ugresic also does a wonderful job of showing up the beauty industry and all its attempts at keeping old age at bay.

The final interpretation is an essay laid out by a folklorist, Aba Bagay, who offers the general discourse and ideas behind the Baba Yaga myth. In a final fantastic touch, she slowly morphs into that crackling, bird-like creature a part of “Hags International.”

It is important to note here that writing about old age and women is not easy. This is the sort of material that can easily slip into gushy sentimentality. But Ugresic is a far better writer than that. Baba Yaga Laid an Egg is funny, touching and even illuminating—but never, ever sappy. It’s going on my list for top reads for the year. Her interpretations of the original myth are searing and inventive. “They shuffle around the world like armies of elderly angels,” Ugresic writes of these sweet old ladies. In other words, Baba Yaga is only as scary (or as endearing) as the old ladies we all know. That ought to reassure the young ones, shouldn’t it?

In her wild, fun and imaginative book, Dubravka Ugresic turns the myth of Baba Yaga on its head. While doing so, she validates what Bette Davis once said (and what one of Ugresic’s characters also acknowledges): “Old age is no place for sissies.”

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 6 readers
PUBLISHER:	Canongate U.S.; Tra edition (February 2, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Dubravka Ugresic
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Europe in Sepia And of another interesting book: The Convalescent by Jessica Anthony

Bibliography:

• In the Jaws of Life and Other Stories (1992)
• Fording the Stream of Consciousness (1993)
• The Museum of Unconditional Surrender (1998)
• Lend Me Your Character (2004)
• The Ministry of Pain (2005)
• Nobody’s Home (2007)
• Baba Yaga Laid an Egg (2009)

Non-fiction:

• Have a Nice Day: From the Balkan War to the American Dream (1994)
• The Culture of Lies: Antipolitical Essays (1998)
• Thank You for Not Reading: Essays on Literary Trivia (2003)
• Karaoke Culture (2011)
• Europe in Sepia (February 2014)