700+ Pages – MostlyFiction Book Reviews We Love to Read! Sat, 28 Oct 2017 19:51:27 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.4.18 THE WOMAN WHO LOST HER SOUL by Bob Shacochis /2014/the-woman-who-lost-her-soul-by-bob-shacochis/ Fri, 03 Jan 2014 13:52:38 +0000 /?p=23568 Book Quote:

“During the final days of the occupation, there was an American woman in Haiti, a photojournalist — blonde, young, infuriating — and she became Thomas Harrington’s obsession.“

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shultman (JAN 3, 2014)

You don’t need to know much about Haitian, Croatian or Turkish politics to fully appreciate The Woman Who Lost Her Soul, but it helps. It also helps to surrender to the journey – a journey that spans over 700 pages – because immediate answers will not be forthcoming.

This is a big book in every sense of the word: big in breadth, in ideas, in audacity. You will lose your heart to it and end up shaking your head in awe and admiration. And along the way, you will learn something about the shadowy world of politics and espionage, the hypocrisy of religion, and the lengths that the players go to keep their sense of identity – their very soul – from fragmenting.

So what IS it about? That’s not an easy question to tackle. The eponymous woman of the title is Dottie Chambers, the hypnotic and damaged daughter of the elite spy Steven Chambers – surely one of the most screwed up characters in contemporary literature. As a young boy, Steven witnessed the atrocities of Tito’s Muslim partisans against his own father, and he came to age with a zeal to right the wrongs…eventually pulling Dottie into his malignant orbit.

That is all I intend to say about the plot, which spans five decades, many countries, and a wide range of themes. The novel consists of five separate books, some short, some long, a catalog-of-sorts of 20th century atrocities and the loss of not only the individual soul, but our collective soul as well. Mr. Shacochis has choreographed a spellbinder, with hints (depending on where you are in the book) of David Mitchell, John Le Carre, Ernest Hemingway, and others…while keeping the narrative distinctly his.

The themes this author tackles go right to the heart of identity and destiny. “We choose the lies in which we participate and in choosing, define ourselves and our actions for a very long time,” he writes at one point. In other passage, we are first introduced to Steven with these words: {Steven would be} “introduced in the most indelible fashion to his destiny, the spiritual map that guides each person finally to the door of the cage that contains his soul, and in his hand a key that will turn the lock, or the wrong key, or no key at all.”

The questions he asks are universal: how do you change back if your former self no longer interlocks cleanly with the shape you have assumed? What happens when you become an actor in a theater without walls or boundaries or audiences? Where is the thin wall of separation between “patriotism and hatred, love and violence, ideology and facts, judgment and passion, intellect and emotion, duty and zealotry, hope and certainty, confidence and hubris, power and fury…” And when do we have the right to challenge and to reclaim our own souls before it’s too late?

This is an amazing book, a true Magnus opus, a story of who we are and how we came to be that way. Yet at its epicenter, Dottie and the two men who love her – her unhealthy father and the book’s moral core, Green Beret Evelle Burnette – who, in their own way, battle for her very soul.

AMAZON READER RATING: from 63 readers
PUBLISHER: Atlantic Monthly Press (September 3, 2013)
REVIEWER: Jill I. Shultman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Wikipedia page on Bob Shacochis
EXTRAS: Interview and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

Bibliography:

Nonfiction:

]]> THE LUMINARIES by Eleanor Catton /2013/the-luminaries-by-eleanor-catton/ Tue, 17 Dec 2013 12:13:06 +0000 /?p=22428 Book Quote:

“But there is no truth except truth in relation, and heavenly relation is composed of wheels in motion, tilting axes, turning dials; it is a clockwork orchestration that alters every minute, never repeating never still…We now look outward…we see the world as we wish to perfect it, and we imagine dwelling there.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (NOV 17, 2013)

Twelve men meet at the Crown Hotel in Hokitika, New Zealand, in January, 1866. A thirteenth, Walter Moody, an educated man from Edinburgh who has come here to find his fortune in gold, walks in. As it unfolds, the interlocking stories and shifting narrative perspectives of the twelve–now thirteen–men bring forth a mystery that all are trying to solve, including Walter Moody, who has just gotten off the Godspeed ship with secrets of his own that intertwine with the other men’s concerns.

This is not an important book. There is no magnificent theme, no moral thicket, no people to emancipate, no countries to defend, no subtext to unravel, and no sizable payoff. Its weightiness is physical, coming in at 832 pages. And yet, it is one of the most marvelous and poised books that I have read. Although I didn’t care for the meandering rambling books of Wilkie Collins, I am reminded here of his style, but Catton is so much more controlled, and possesses the modern day perspective in which to peer back.

I felt a warmth and a shiver at each passing chapter, set during the last days of the New Zealand gold rush. Catton hooked me in in this Victorian tale of a piratical captain; a Maori gemstone hunter; Chinese diggers (or “hatters”); the search for “colour” (gold); a cache of hidden gold; séances; opium; fraud; ruthless betrayal; infidelity; a politician; a prostitute; a Jewish newspaperman; a gaoler; shipping news; shady finance; a ghostly presence; a missing man; a dead man; and a spirited romance. And there’s more between Dunedin and Hokitika to titillate the adventurous reader.

Primarily, The Luminaries is an action-adventure, sprawling detective story, superbly plotted, where the Crown Hotel men try to solve it, while sharing secrets and shame of their own. There’s even a keen courtroom segment later in the story. And, there are crucial characters that are not gathered in the Crown that night who link everyone together. The prostitute and opium addict, Anna Wetherell, is nigh the center of this story, as she is coveted or loved or desired by all the townspeople.

The layout of the book is stellar: the spheres of the skies and its astrological charts. You don’t need to understand the principles and mathematics of astrology (I don’t), but it is evident that knowledge of this pseudoscience would add texture to the reading experience, as it provides the structure and frame of the book. The characters’ traits can be found in their individual sun signs (such as the duality of a Germini). The drawings of charts add to the mood, and the chapters get successively shorter after the long Crown chapter. The cover of the book illustrates the phases of the moon, from full moon to sliver, alluding to the waning narrative lengths as the story progresses.

“But onward also rolls the outer sphere–the boundless present, which contains the bounded past.”

Take note of the cast list at the beginning, which is quite helpful for the initial 200 or 300 pages. With so many vivid characters coming at you at once, it is difficult at first to absorb. However, as the pages sail (and they will, if this appeals to you), you won’t even need the names and professions. The story and its striking, almost theatrical players become gradually and permanently installed, thoroughly and unforgettably. From the scar on Captain Francis Carver’s cheek, to the widow’s garment on Anna Wetherell’s gaunt frame, the lively images and descriptions animate this boisterous, vibrant story.

Catton is a master storyteller; she combines this exacting 19th century style and narrator–and the “we” that embraces the reader inside the tale–with the faintest sly wink of contemporary perspective. Instead of the authorial voice sounding campy, stilted, and antiquated, there is a fresh whiff of nuanced canniness, a knowing Catton who uncorks the delectable Victorian past by looking at it from the postmodern future.

You will either be intoxicated by this big brawl of a book, or weighed down in its heft. If you are looking for something more than it is, then look no further than the art of reading. There’s no mystery to the men; Catton lays out their morals, scruples, weaknesses, and strengths at the outset. The women had a little poetic mystery to them, but in all, these were familiar players–she drew up stock 19th century characters, but livened them up, so that they leaped madly from the pages. There isn’t much to interrogate except your own anticipation. If you’ve read Colour, by Rose Tremain, don’t expect any similarities except the time, place, setting, and the sweat and grime of the diggers. Otherwise, the two books are alike as fish and feathers.

The stars shine bright as torches, or are veiled behind a mist, like the townspeople and story that behave under the various constellations. Catton’s impeccably plotted yarn invites us to dwell in this time and place. At times, I felt I mined the grand nuggets of the story, and at other times, it blew away like dust.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 230 readers
PUBLISHER: Little, Brown and Company; First Edition edition (October 15, 2013)
REVIEWER: Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Wikipedia page on Eleanor Catton
EXTRAS:
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Another big book set in New Zealand:

Bibliography:

]]> 11/22/63: A NOVEL by Stephen King /2011/112263-a-novel-by-stephen-king/ Tue, 08 Nov 2011 13:34:45 +0000 /?p=21953 Book Quote:

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

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (NOV 8, 2011)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AMAZON READER RATING: from 2250 readers
PUBLISHER: Scribner; Original edition (November 8, 2011)
REVIEWER: Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Stephen King
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

Bibliography:

*1Takes place in Castle Rock, Maine
*2Takes place in Derry, Maine
*3 Takes place in Little Tall Island, Maine
*P These two books have one “pinhole” vision into each other

The Dark Tower Series

Originally written as Richard Bachman

Co-written with Peter Straub

Non-Fiction:

And the Movies created from his books:

]]> REAMDE by Neal Stephenson /2011/reamde-by-neal-stephenson/ Fri, 30 Sep 2011 12:55:08 +0000 /?p=21095 Book Quote:

“…what mattered very much to Richard was what an imaginary dwarf would encounter once he hefted a virtual pick and began to delve into the side of a mountain. In a conventional video game, the answer was literally nothing. The mountain was just a surface, thinner than paper Mache, with no interior. But in Pluto’s world, the first bite of the shovel would reveal underlying soil, and the composition of that soil would reflect its provenance in the seasonal growth and decay of vegetation and the saecular erosion of whatever was uphill of it, and once the dwarf dug through the soil he would find bedrock, and the bedrock would be of a particular mineral composition. It would be sedimentary or igneous or metamorphic, and if the dwarf were lucky it might contain usable quantities of gold or silver or iron ore.”

Book Review:

Review by Bill Brody  (SEP 30, 2011)

Neal Stephenson’s ReaMde, a play on words for the ReadMe file that accompanies many computer programs, is above all a wild adventure/detective story set in the present day. As one would expect from this author, current technology features prominently. The cast of characters is international, offering windows into such diverse types as Russian gangsters, Chinese hackers, American entrepreneurs, Idaho survivalists and second amendment fanatics among many others. A video game, T’Rain, is central to the tale. Most of the characters are addicted to the game; much of the detection is done by playing the game or by mining the data kept by the game. ReaMde as a story is something like a prolonged session of T’Rain. T’Rain is a play on words for terrain.

Reamde is a computer virus that hijacks data by encrypting it so it is unreadable. Victims get a computer message including a file named ReaMde, that they mistakenly read as ReadMe. ReadMe files are text files with important how-to information and are commonly bundled with downloaded computer programs. The victim opens the file, but instead of getting a text message with useful information, they activate the virus. The victim is told that they must pay a ransom in virtual currency within the T’Rain game in order to receive the encryption key that will free their data. The virtual currency is worth a fairly inconsequential sum in real money, something like $75. The action starts as a consequence to Reamde hijacking credit card data that has been sold to Russian gangsters. The gangsters kidnap the seller and his girlfriend, who just happens to be the niece of the founder of T’Rain, the computer game in which the ransom must be paid.

T’Rain is a game played on the Internet with thousands, maybe millions of players at any given time. The game play consists of the interaction of this massive cast of characters in an incredibly detailed world. ReaMde is played out in much the same way with a very large cast of fascinating characters. They include:

Richard Forthrat, billionaire founder of Corporation 9592, the parent company of the computer game, T’Rain, a game distinguished by the incredible richness of its simulation of an entire world, its underlying physics and 4.5 billion year geophysical history;
Zula, his niece, an Eritrean refugee with a specialty doing computer simulations of the geophysics of volcanoes, a skill she is employed to use to enhance the virtual richness of T’Rain; Ivanov, the Russian gangster who purchased the credit card data from Zula’s boyfriend and kidnaps the two to start off the adventure; CIA and M16 operatives, gun nuts, fundamentalists of all stripes from Christian survivalists to Islamic jihadists.

The story flows remarkably smoothly for all its complexity, and is immensely readable. All the ends tie together and the action never flags, just like an addictive video game. This is a great entertainment for anyone in tune with modern computer technology, gaming or just plain interested in a good adventure story. One wonders how an entire world’s physics could be simulated in such a game. The story itself is like the computer game that is itself a part of the story, raising the idea of recursive games within games. How could a game with such virtual complexity be supported? This is the only part of the tale that is science fiction in that even the much simpler complexity of atmospheric or ocean physics is beyond the reach of current technology.

ReaMde is like a video game, and recalls the serialized adventure stories from the pulp era with its intensely interconnected series of adventures and adventurers. The characters are all fascinating. They each embody an adventurer or geek type possessing exceptional luck, physical and/or technical prowess. Each spin of the adventure dial is within the realm of possibility, but there is no sense that this is realism. What we have is great escapist literature with a gaming twist. In short, just about perfect for the geek-gamer audience.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-3-5from 508 readers
PUBLISHER: William Morrow (September 20, 2011)
REVIEWER: Bill Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Neal Stephenson
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Our reviews of:

Bibliography:

The Baroque Cycle

Non-Fiction

Written as Stephen Bury (with his uncle J. Fredrick George):

]]> THE BEST AMERICAN NOIR OF THE CENTURY edited by Otto Penzler and James Ellroy /2011/the-best-american-noir-of-the-century-edited-by-otto-penzler-and-james-ellroy/ Sun, 16 Jan 2011 14:05:20 +0000 /?p=15443 Book Quote:

“A six-week chronology from first kiss to gas chamber is common in noir.” (James Ellroy)

Book Review:

Review by Guy Savage  (JAN 16, 2011)

At almost 800 pages and around $20 the anthology The Best American Noir of the Century is guaranteed to please noir fans. The book is the no-brainer choice for anyone interested in crime fiction, but even more than that, anyone even remotely curious about the delineations under the umbrella term “crime fiction” must read Otto Penzler’s inspired introduction. As a reader of crime and noir fiction, there’s nothing more annoying than to see the word “noir” bandied about; its misuse threatens to render the term meaningless, so here’s Otto Penzler on this “prodigiously overused term” to set the record straight:

“Noir works, whether films, novels, or short stories, are existential, pessimistic tales about people, including (or especially) protagonists who are seriously flawed or morally questionable. The tone is generally bleak or nihilistic, with characters whose greed, lust, jealousy, and alienation lead them into a downward spiral as their plans and schemes inevitably go awry….The machinations of their relentless lust will cause them to lie, steal, cheat, and even kill as they become more and more entangled in a web from which they cannot extricate possibly themselves. And, while engaged in this hopeless quest, they will be double-crossed, betrayed and ultimately ruined.”

There’s more, much more from Penzler, including an analysis of the private detective story, in which the PI’s “own sense of morality [will be] used in the pursuit of justice,” and even a few words on how film noir “blurs the distinction between hard-boiled private eye narratives and true noir stories.”

But this is just the foreword. What of the book itself?

The stories in this rich collection represent a dazzling array of styles and subjects. The Tod Robins story “Spurs” (later adapted in the film Freaks), sets the stage for what’s to come, and in this story we meet a host of weirdos and societal rejects who gravitate around the circus. In this classic tale of love gone wrong, circus dwarf Jacques Corbé falls in love with Jeanne Marie, the beautiful bareback rider. She loves the dashing Simon Lefleur, but he isn’t ready to marry a penniless woman. So when the dwarf inherits a substantial amount of money and proposes to Jeanne Marie, she accepts him. This is the beginning of a classic noir tale–a destructive love triangle laced with lust, greed and jealousy.

Other names in the collection include James Cain’s “Pastorale,” MacKinlay Kantor’s “Gun Crazy” (made into a film), Dorothy Hughes “The Homecoming,” Mickey Spillane’s “The Lady Says Die,” Jim Thompson’s “Forever After,” Cornell Woolrich’s “For the Rest of Her Life,” David Morrell’s “The Dripping,” James Ellroy’s “Since I Don’t Have You,” James Crumley’s “Hot Springs” and Patricia Highsmith’s “Slowly, Slowly in the Wind.” I was a bit surprised to see Joyce Carol Oates make the list with “Faithless” as I incorrectly tend to associate her with entirely different subject matter, but then I remembered her marvelous short story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been,” (made into the film Smooth Talk), and the Oates selection fell into place.

There are a total of 39 stories here, and the preponderance falls towards the end of the twentieth century–just 12 before 1960. This selection may bother some readers who perhaps hoped for more classic noir from the 40s and 50s, but since I view collections as a great way to pick up names I’d never have found otherwise, it’s all fine by me.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 21 readers
PUBLISHER: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1 edition (October 5, 2010)
REVIEWER: Guy Savage
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Wikipedia page on Otto Penzler and James Ellroy
EXTRAS: Library Journal interview with Otto Penzler

Kirkus’ comparison to A Century of Noir
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories

Bibliography:

]]> A SOLDIER OF THE GREAT WAR by Mark Helprin /2010/a-soldier-of-the-great-war-by-mark-helprin/ Sat, 06 Nov 2010 19:42:16 +0000 /?p=13448 Book Quote:

“This was the sound that, on the Western Front, had begun to drown out the music of the world. It was clear to Alessandro, and easily understandable, that, for some, music would cease to exist. But not for him, not for him. The electricity rose up his spine and he trembled not from shock but because, over the sound of the guns, he was still able to hear sonatas, symphonies, and songs.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  (NOV 06, 2010)

Alessandro Giuliani is listening to field guns being tested in Munich in 1914, the year before Italy entered the War against Germany and Austria. Although mostly interested in the visual arts, Alessandro should know about music and beauty of all kinds; as a Professor of Aesthetics, it is his metier. But he learns about it the hard way. When the war breaks out, he is just about to take his doctorate at the University of Bologna. He volunteers for the Italian navy in the hope of avoiding conscription into the trenches, but he ends up in some of the worst fighting of the war nonetheless, facing the Austrians across the river Isonzo. Subsequent phases of the war will take him to Sicily, the high Alps, and many other places, and he proves as natural a soldier as he is an aesthetician. Alessandro’s appreciation of beauty, which shines through every chapter of his reminiscences as an old man in the 1960s, has not emerged despite his exposure to death and danger, but because of them.

“From the quarry, scepters of light emerged at sharp angles, like mineral crystals, and the thicket from which they came was a fume of light. Sometimes the beams were cranked into different positions as if they were choosing new targets among the stars. Hundreds of men worked below, in a brilliance that made the vast quarry look like a piece of bright moon that had crashed to earth. They appeared to be mining not stone but white light, and when they took the stone in slabs and caused it to float through empty space, tracked by searchlights, hanging on gossamer cables and unseen chains, it was as if they were handling light in cubic measure, cutting and transporting it in dense self-generating quanta from the heart of magical cliffs.”

Alessandro’s image of looking down into a marble quarry as men work through the night to make tombstones for the Italian dead is one of dozens that have stuck with me indelibly since I first read this wonderful book a decade ago. It is a magical image, cinematic in its theatricality and scale, yet the men down below are prisoners working murderous sixteen-hour shifts, and Alessandro is about to join them. Yet he finds wonder everywhere: in a midnight bathe in the Isonzo between the two front lines, in the sunlight glinting off a flight of birds that feed off the battlefield dead, in the walls of flame from burning stubble that line the Italian coast as he travels slowly southward on a cattle steamer, in the fury of a thunderstorm breaking over icebound peaks, in galloping a fine stallion across the plains of Hungary. “And how does God speak to you?” somebody asks him; “In the language of everything that is beautiful,” he replies.

I cannot think of any other book more full of amazement. The only other modern thing that comes close in fantasy, wonder, or scale is David Mitchell’s recent The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. But this comparison also points to a weakness that I noticed on second reading but missed or excused the first time. At 800 pages, it is a long book, slow to get started and over-extended at the end. Although Helprin skillfully sets up the combination of reality and imagination at the beginning, and is careful to ensure that every episode, however colorful, is also realistically plausible, the long sequence of such events demands an increasing suspension of disbelief. There comes a time, after about 500 pages, when one wonders how many more humps and turns this roller-coaster has. There is also a bizarre thread, involving a former employee of Alessandro’s father, a diminutive mad clerk placed in an important position at the Ministry of War, which seems more in the manner of Catch-22 than the basic seriousness of the rest of the book.

And it is serious. It is a book about God, and honor, and joy, and endurance, and above all about love. Love in a spiritual sense, love among families, love between friends, the love of man for woman. There is a moment early in the book when Alessandro comes upon a young girl weeping quietly beside a Roman fountain at night. There is another when he goes to Venice to look at the enigmatic picture by Giorgione known as “La tempesta,” involving a young soldier and a naked woman with a baby facing one another against the background of a gathering storm. Both gleam with that magical grace which Helprin conjures so effortlessly. But both will resonate throughout the book to wondrous effect, more than once bringing tears to my eyes, and lingering in my mind for ever.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-5from 210 readers
PUBLISHER: Mariner Books (June 1, 2005)
REVIEWER: Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Mark Helprin
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our reviews of:

Bibliography:

Illustrated Trilogy (with Chris van Allsburg):

Nonfiction:

]]> SHADOW COUNTRY by Peter Matthiessen /2009/shadow-country-by-peter-matthiessen/ Tue, 21 Jul 2009 00:31:38 +0000 /?p=2900 Book Quote:

“Some would say that Edgar Watson is a bad man by nature. Ed Watson is the man I was created. If I was created evil, somebody better hustle off to church, take it up with God. I don’t believe a man is born with a bad nature. I enjoy folks, most of ‘em. But it’s true I drink too much in my black moods, see only threats and enmity on every side. And in that darkness I strike too fast, and by the time I come clear, trouble has caught up with me again.”
~ Edgar J. Watson

Book Review:

Reviewed by Doug Bruns (JUL 20, 2009)

I’ve been concerned about reviewing this book from the get go. For starters, it is big at eight hundred and ninety-two pages. Getting one’s head around all those words is, plain and simple, challenging. And then there is the longevity involved, for lack of a better word. Matthiessen confesses at the outset that his first notes on the work, “to my horror date back to 1978.” That is a long time to invest in a project and the reviewer wants to do it justice. And there is the subject matter: Nothing less than a reckoning of the “last American frontier,” the turn of the century coast of southwest Florida, the Ten Thousand Islands, as reflected through the experience of a single, highly complex, enigmatic figure, Edgar J. Watson. Thrown in for good measure are themes of racism, corruption, expansionism, Reconstruction and Jim Crow, infidelity, alcoholism, sibling rivalry, political malfeasance, species extinction, ecological destruction, hurricanes, psychosis and obsession. Flavor the whole stew with more than a dash of violence and, well, you get the idea.

So, having laid bare my insecurities, I will proceed with trepidation.

The novel starts at the end, with the murder of Watson by a mob, later dubbed a posse. This is a common biographical device, starting with the subject’s death and then constructing the life leading up to it. This is fiction, however, though with a historical foundation. Watson existed. By starting in this manner, Matthiessen has done a couple of clever things. He has shaped a narrative which echos the discipline of biography. We know how the story ends. This feels right, and lends instant credibility to the pages that follow. Secondly, he has defused a tension at the outset which might otherwise drive the narrative in an unintended direction. The reader doesn’t have to wonder what happens. Instead, the reader wonders why it happened and thus enters a flow of narration which ebbs and rises like the tides upon which the story largely centers. Immediately following this bloody opening–Watson is pumped with 33 bullets–we experience a literary technique which I think is unique and, at times, brilliant.

Specifically, the novel consists of three “books.” Book One is comprised of 51 first-person renderings. There are 14 different voices, each accounting for a different perspective, each sharing how the narrator’s life intersected with the life of Watson. I want to plainly state, “Book One” affords us a literary experience that is first rate. The voices, rendered in personal style and manner, filled with colloquialisms and individual tone, sing. It is obvious that Matthiessen has a wonderful ear for nuance and dialogue. For example here is Frank Tippin, sheriff, describing Eddie Watson, son of E.J. Watson: “In his reddish looks, Eddie took after his dad, with the same kind of husky mulishness about him; what was missing was the fire in his color. He put me in mind of a strong tree dead at the heart.” Or this account by neighbor Owen Harden describing the look of dead Bet Tucker, who was murdered mysteriously on a parcel of Watson land: “Without no lips, her white buck teeth made her look starved as a dead pony. Only mercy was, no eyes was left to stare.” It is virtuosic, this ability to render so many voices so accurately.

With each of the 51 accounts a different puzzle piece is laid on the table and our story unfolds. Some of these accounts are by people who hate Watson. Some love him. Others proclaimed him simply an unsolvable mystery. We learn that Watson, as a farmer, is talented beyond comparison. But also, incongruently, he is a deadeye shot with a revolver. We discover he is a loving father and gentlemanly in his manner; yet, through the intervention of powerful friends, he beat a murder rap while traveling in the north. Each voice lays down a perspective of Watson so that what remains is a tantalizing portrait of ambiguity. There is a Watson genealogy included at the outset of the book and I found myself referring to it regularly as I attempted to keep pace with cast of characters. There is no such guide for the neighbors, towns people, freed black men, mistresses and cohorts, however–and they are abundant, which can be very confusing, particularly since many go by nicknames. By the end of this section you get a sense of the picture that has been parsed out to you, but it is not cohesive by design and the picture in the puzzle can only be approximated.

Book Two grows somewhat problematic. The technique of book one is abandoned and an omniscient narrator takes over to relate the quest of favored son Lucius and his attempt to write the biography of his father. I fear the wonderful voices of the previous section leave us and are replaced by a dogged flat style. Here is part of the prospective biography, as Lucius pitches it to a publisher (the italics are his):

“This bold energetic man of rare intelligence and enterprise must also be understood as a man undone by his own deep flaws. He was known to drink to grievous excess, for example, which often turned him volatile and violent. On the other hand, his evil repute has been wildly exaggerated by careless journalists and their local informants, who seek to embellish their limited acquaintance with a “desperado”; with the result that the real man has been virtually entombed by tale and legend which since his death has petrified as myth.”

Matthiessen writes in an author’s note, “..the middle section, which had served originally as a kind of connecting tissue, yet contained much of the heart and brain of the whole organism, lacked its own armature or bony skeleton.” I should say at this point that the three sections were previously published independently. The author, however, never felt they worked as a trilogy and took to revising them and stitching them together whole cloth, a task that took eight years. Unfortunately, the middle section still lacks the sparkle of the sections before and after. That said, it does help us bring our puzzle into focus, locking together many of the pieces which were randomly laid out in the first section.

The final section, Book Three, takes up the voice of our anti-hero, E.J. Watson. Returning to a first-person technique, Watson gets to tell his story. And here we start to understand all that has preceded. The temptation is to believe we now understand everything. But how can we understand a voice which is, by all accounts, including his own, filled with duplicity and layered in mystery? I was never sure if Matthiessen wanted the reader to draw conclusions from Watson’s personal account or if he left the door open for suspicion. I didn’t find this device convincing, in other words. The third section, however, does afford the reader the complete linear picture. It is here we have the only cohesive account of the events in this life, however clouded and self-serving they may delivered. It is also the place where Watson’s shadow self, an “alien presence” is first revealed, affording us some insight into the conundrum of Edgar Watson. While suffering a beating at the hands of his father, the young Edgar realized the “first manifestation of ‘Jack Watson,’ a shadow brother.” He confesses to inventing this sibling to deal with the pain and trauma of abuse. This shadow being explains the “crazy eyes” we’ve heard tell of evidenced during times of violence in the mature Watson. It also lends us insight into the title, as shadows permeate the landscape as well as the personality.

If I have belabored the mechanics of this novel it is because the novel is built upon a unique and multifaceted structure and is more solid because of it. It, the structure, warrants description. If that structure creeks and moans occasionally under its own weight, it is of no consequence. Matthiessen is clearly obsessed with Watson and is attempting to convey a kaleidoscopic sense of the character and the times in which he lived. He delivers to us his subject in all facets and from all angles. It is as if Ishmael, the crew of the Pequod, and Ahab himself were each to relate their singular version of ambition, obsession and destruction, as well as whale hunting.

Imagine what you know of the great American West, the drive across the plains and the development and commerce that followed. Or Imagine the early Northeast, the pilgrims, the witch hunts, The Last of the Mohicans. If you are like me, this geography of the imagination is easily rendered. So too are the Texas territories, or the Mississippi (thanks to Twain, who’s voice and influence is evident here), or Jamestown, Williamsburg. But what of the last of the unknown territories, the last place where a “desperado” could hide, and not only hide but flourish, provided he had the sand? Can you conjure up such a pace? Perhaps it is an educational gap, of which I confess to too many, but I never considered Florida historically, short of Ponce de Leon. Now, imagine dropping into that gap a clever man of unabashed ambition and nerve, labor and resources aplenty, guns and knives with which to carry out a personal vision. Imagine too an absence of law and an abundance of whisky. This man would live here, on the Ten Thousand Islands, amid the mosquitos and crocs and snakes, off the coast of Florida, for two decades. He would turn 35 acres into a sugar cane factory, spawning an industry. He would love his wife and pay his bills on time. He would read history of ancient Greece and morn the loss of loved ones. Yet, one day he would be gunned down by his neighbors. They claimed he was a murderer who would kill his workers before payday, a man who had escaped the law in the north and the west. No one would be arraigned or tried for his murder. And the land he worked and was tied to would later become part of the Everglades park system.

If you can hold that image for simply a second you will have an inkling of the wonders at work in this novel.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 100 readers
PUBLISHER: Modern Library (December 2, 2008)
REVIEWER: Doug Bruns
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Wikipedia page on Peter Matthiessen
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Another Southern “Western” fiction”

Other fiction set in 1000 Islands/Everglades:

Bibliography:

Fiction:

Selected Non-Fiction:

]]> 2666 by Roberto Bolano /2009/2666-by-roberto-bolano/ /2009/2666-by-roberto-bolano/#comments Fri, 03 Jul 2009 12:18:00 +0000 /?p=2554 Book Quote:

“Do you believe in love?” asked Reiter.
“Frankly, no,” said the girl.
“What about honesty?” asked Reiter.
“Ugh, that’s worse than love,” said the girl.
“Do you believe in sunsets,” asked Reiter, “starry nights, bright mornings?”
“No, no, no,” said the girl with a gesture of evident distaste. “I don’t believe in anything ridiculous.”
“You’re right,” said Reiter. “What about books?”
“Even worse,” said the girl.

 

Book Review:

Reviewed by Doug Bruns (JUL 03, 2009)

I came to Roberto Bolaño’s 2666: A Novel after a long spell of reading narrative non-fiction. I was spending a lot of time with other women and my wife knew about it, Joan Didion and Anne Dillard, in particular. Not that she minded, my wife. She is refreshingly open about these things, but I was starting to feel guilty and was, frankly, longing for some male companionship, specifically companionship that would take me down a windy path, into a woods or alley, lose me on the wet streets of a foreign city, then find me again, guide me then threaten me–all the while making me feel more manly, whatever that might mean. Hemingway can do that, to cite a cliché. Also, I was coming to Maine for the summer and wanted to get lost in a big thick weighty book, a book that would be wasted in the city where it would be not so much attacked as toyed with. How can you read a 900 page book but to attack it? You can’t nibble at it. You have to take blocks of time and sit down in a quiet place and rest the tome on your lap and go after it, like a loon after a harbor sardine. I had wanted to read 2666 since it came out in English last year (from the Spanish), published posthumously a year after Bolaño’s death. Now was the time.


2666 consists of five books or chapters. According to an opening note, Bolaño, fearing he would not survive the work, thought it would be most profitable to publish the five “novels” separately. His estate, however, decided differently, arguing that keeping the work whole “seems preferable.” He did, indeed, finish a first draft of the last section. The five sections could stand alone, but Bolaño was writing 2666 as a single work, and it works best read that way. At center to the five sections is the Mexican town of Santa Teresa. Here, in this industrial US border town, an appalling series of murders has been going on unabated. Young girls have been abducted and raped and killed and dumped in fields, alleyways and barren landscapes. The police are impotent to stop the killing. Santa Teresa is modeled after Ciudad Juárez, where a series of murders of factory-working women and girls remains unsolved. At its essence 2666 is a conventional mystery, a who done-it. The murders, taking place over a series of years, share the markings of a serial killer or killers. The other major mystery contained in the novel is the reclusive author Archimboldi, a long-missing Nobel-nominated German novelist. The book opens as four critics cum detectives attempt to track him down while building their careers as scholars around interpretations of his work. The bookend end chapter finds the return of Archimboldi in the flesh, or at least we draw the conclusion, as best we are directed, that we have found him, as certitude is purposefully missing in this novel. In the middle sections he disappears, but is never far from the action, hinted at and drawn upon as a motif incarnate. Indeed, everything in 2666 seems cryptic and shrouded in mystery.

The prose of the novel is straightforward and direct, refreshingly so. It is elegant and rich at one moment, documentary the next. It is opaque. So much so that at one point I found myself enjoying a sentence of particular fluidity and grace and then realized that I had been reading the same sentence for four pages. These were not mind-numbing twisted Proustian pages. But rather, four pages consisting of one remarkable sentence that carried the reader along like a gentle stream. And this is what the book requires, like all great literature: the compliance of the reader. You must give yourself up to it. Like the magical realism of a previous generation, Bolaño’s style requires submission. In the modern tradition, the novel explores all streams of thought. It exploits nuance. Subtlety is in short order–or rather, subtlety permeates everything such that subtlety is lost. By this I mean, the reader must be prepared to be exhausted in the pursuit of creating a masterpiece. There are plots and subplots, nuance, blind alleys and most challengingly, lack of resolution. The mysteries, like life, grow in complexity and are never solved. It is as if a grand oil painting were being attempted in front of our eyes and every brush stroke is being observed. Indeed, it is no coincidence that the protagonist’s name differs from the Renaissance painter’s by only two letters, an observation mentioned in the book. It is telling that Arcimboldo’s paintings were representative portraits, faces created from objects such as fruits, vegetables and flowers. Our guy, Archimboldi, is likewise not so much seen as represented.

In talking to my bookseller recently, he said someone had recently commented on the book, decrying it, putting it aside, saying, “I’m not going to punish myself with this any longer.” I think this is interesting. It is a challenging book, but accessible. If there is punishment to be found in 2666 it would be specific to the fourth section entitled, “The Part About The Crimes.” Here we suffer through 284 pages of murder, rape and molestation. Though minor motifs are employed, we are bludgeoned with account after account of the murders of Santa Theresa. The section breaks suit with the other sections stylistically. It becomes raw and sparse. But still, the artistic motive remains. That is to say, here, as elsewhere, the author explores to the point of exhaustion the work at hand, the attempt to create a masterpiece brushstroke by brushstroke. As a reader, committed to experiencing a literary work of the highest order, I believe I understand why such a section exists, but that does not make it less of a grind.

There is a passage on page 786 spoken by a very minor character (the book is full of minor characters who have lives involving very minor characters, spawning yet more and so forth in increasing twists and turns.): “By now I knew it was pointless to write. Or that it was worth it only if one was prepared to write a masterpiece.” 2666 has been hailed as a masterpiece by many, but history will judge definitively should that be the case. I think this passage telling though, an author’s nod as to his intent–that writing is only worth it if one is prepared to write a masterpiece. Two pages later the same very minor character, walking away from the challenge of writing a masterpiece, resolves: “What a relief to give up literature, to give up writing and simply read!” What a relief to simply read. The sentence washed over me like a summer wave. Henry James said that the only obligation of the novel is to be interesting. This is a refreshingly simple evaluation. Is 2666 interesting? Yes. Can one, as the very minor character implies, find relief in simply reading it? Yes again. A troubling relief, given the subject matter, but relief regardless–which is core to the artistic experience.

I finished the novel, closed the covers and turned to my wife. “I wish it didn’t end,” I said. I felt as if the author had inhabited my closing thought. Knowing that he fought to finish the book before he died, I am given to believe Bolaño shared the same sentiment.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 188 readers
PUBLISHER: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (November 11, 2008)
REVIEWER: Doug Bruns
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Wikipedia page on Roberto Bolano
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: This book makes me think of:

And see our review of:

Bibliography (translations only):

]]> /2009/2666-by-roberto-bolano/feed/ 2 ANATHEM by Neal Stephenson /2009/anathem-by-neal-stephenson/ Fri, 01 May 2009 21:01:49 +0000 /?p=1462 Book Quote:

Anathem: (1) In  Proto- Orth, a poetic or musical invocation of Our Mother Hylaea, which since the time of Adrakhones has been the climax of the daily liturgy (hence the Fluccish word Anthem meaning a song of great emotional resonance, esp. one that inspires listeners to sing along). Note: this sense is archaic, and used only in a ritual context where it is unlikely to be confused with the much more commonly used sense 2. (2) In New Orth, an aut by which an incorrigible fraa or suur is ejected from the math and his or her work sequestered (hence the Fluccish word Anathema meaning intolerable statements or ideas). See Throwback.

Book Review:

Reviewed by Ann Wilkes (MAY 01, 2009)

In Anathem, “concents”  with cultures similar yet underlying philosophies opposite to our convents and monasteries dot the world of Arbre. The concents cloister adherents with a religious devotion to scientific theory from the outside world and its “saecular” ideas. From the saecular world’s point of view, the fraas and suurs stay in their concents, without technology, to protect the outside world from scientific advancement in dangerous areas. They must work on their scientific theories without benefit of any hardware or software to develop new technologies.

Just as our hero, Fraa Erasmus and his friends prepare to graduate to the next level of their vocation, Erasmus’ mentor, Orolo, detects something strange in the night sky. Then Inquisition representatives lock down the starhenge, which houses the telescopes, and banish Orolo from the concent.

Risking detection by the hierarchs and the Inquisition, Erasmus and his friends try to piece together what little intelligence they can gather, including a recording taken by a telescope that he sneaks into the starhenge to remove.

Once it becomes clear that the object in orbit isn’t of their world, Erasmus and his co-conspirators are sent out of the concent to a “convox” of fraas and suurs from across the planet.

“The bells of Provener flipped switches in my brain, as if I were one of those poor dogs that Saunts of old would wire up for psychological experiments. First I felt guilty: late again! Then my legs and arms ached for the labor of winding the clock. Next would be hunger for the midday meal. Finally, I felt wounded that they’d managed to wind the clock without us. “

The action and intrigue begins well into this complex, 900 page tome. Expect to read 160 pages of world building and description before the plot begins to unfold. If you can handle tutelage in quantum mechanics, alternate realities, geometry, philosophy and history as a foreign exchange student to this world of Arbre, you’ll be rewarded with a masterfully orchestrated plot full of culture, religion, politics, intrigue and mind-bending scientific speculations with characters that will remain with you for days. And in case it gets a bit much, Stephenson provides dictionary entries along the way and a full glossary in the back of the book.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 329 readerss
PUBLISHER: William Morrow (September 9, 2008)
REVIEWER: Ann Wilkes
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Neal Stephenson
EXTRAS: Excerpt Wikipedia in-depth page on ANATHEM
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Our reviews of:

Bibliography:

The Baroque Cycle

Non-Fiction

Written as Stephen Bury (with his uncle J. Fredrick George):

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