“Iris Dunleavy?” asked Mary. “Is she the plantation wife? She dresses so well for a lunatic. She had the most colorful flounces on her skirt the other night.”

Book Review:

Review by Judi Clark  (FEB 9, 2014)

This is Kathy Hepinstall’s fourth novel… and I’ve read all four, so obviously I like this author. She writes a different book each time and thus one never knows what will be found upon picking up her latest, although one can be sure it will be both literary and lyrical, no matter the tone and subject.

Blue Asylum takes place during the Civil War years on Sanibel Island on the west coast of Florida.

A judge finds the main character, Iris Dunleavy, insane essentially for hating and embarrassing her husband, “Wives were not supposed to hate their husbands. It was not in the proper order of things.” Her rich husband pays extra for her to be cured at the institution with the best reputation, the SANIBEL ASYLUM FOR LUNATICS which is managed by British born psychiatrist Dr. Cowell, who stubbornly believes that Iris is insane because a judge declared it. But Iris insists that she is not insane, that she was merely escaping from a hateful husband and cruel man. As she reveals her horrific story bit by bit, we can see that while she may not be clinically insane, she may have been crazy mad considering the decisions/actions she undertook (and continues to undertake).

She befriends the doctor’s 14-year-old son Wendell and another patient, Ambrose, who is suffering from something that happened during the civil war. She longs to escape and eventually does but with devastating effects.

I liked many things about this book, but I didn’t “love it,” at least not as much as I did The Absence of Nectar and Prince of Lost Places. But I did enjoy it immensely even though it is a little heavy handed on the message, not unlike her debut (and Oprah book club choice)  The House of Gentle Men.  Then again, given headlines such as Todd Akin’s comment on legitimate rape, it may be that heavy handed feminist historical literature is still necessary.

Hepinstall captures the historical detail of well and it is very visual as she sets a mood and imagery that plays out well both as metaphor and setting:

“Dawn broke soft and clean on the island of shell and marl and current. It was a day like any other, one more day in a season when marking the days was difficult, since the balminess was resolute and the birds were attuned to the tides, the tides to the moon, and the moon to the lunatics, under their crazy spell, waxing and waning in the accordance with the fluctuations of their madness and the depth of passions. A group of terns had gathered at the edge of a calm sea, and a single raccoon, caught after a daylight, skittered out of the dune vegetation and into the forest, leaving behind a loggerhead nest full of ruined eggs, shells broken and half-formed turtles spilling out in the sand.”

Hepinstall considers this a love story… and it is, but not the happy kind. This novel is an excellent choice for book clubs.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 139 readers
PUBLISHER:	Mariner Books; Reprint edition (April 9, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Judi Clark
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Kathy Hepinstall really humorous blog
EXTRAS:	Website for Blue Asylum Reading Guide Interview with Kathy Hepinstall
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Prince of Lost Places  The Absence of Nectar The House of Gentle Men

Bibliography:

• The House of Gentle Men (2000)
• The Absence of Nectar (2001)
• Prince of Lost Places (2003)
• Blue Asylum (2012)

“Happiness is like water…We’re always trying to grab onto it, but it’s always slipping between our fingers.”

Book Review:

Review by Friederike Knabe  (JAN 12, 2014)

Chinelo Okparanta came to my attention after her story, America, was a finalist for the 2013 Caine Prize for African Writing. It tells the touching story of a very special friendship between two young women that challenges Nigerian traditions and social conventions… America has been published as one of ten stories in this, her first collection, Happiness, like Water. Okparanta is without a doubt becoming a promising representative of the new generation of Nigerian and African writers who are giving growing prominence to the field of African short fiction writing.

Chinelo Okparanta’s engaging stories in this book, some set in Nigeria, some among Nigerian immigrants in the US, explore a wide range of topical subjects and concerns. Mostly told through the eyes of a first person protagonist, she writes with confidence and sensitivity, her language is subtle, yet also lucid and powerful. Despite the short fiction format, her characters are realistically drawn and we can comprehend the challenges of their various circumstances. While her stories are rooted in her Nigerian background (she moved with her parents from Nigeria to the US at the age of 10) she addresses such issues as love, longing and betrayal, faith and doubt, and inner-family and inter-generational tensions and violence in such a way that they move beyond the specific and become stories of human struggle and survival. Yes, there is happiness too – fleeting moments that need to be savoured, hope for a future where it can establish itself…

Do I have favourites among the stories? Maybe I do, but each reader will find those that feel closer to home or that affect us individually more deeply than others. Fortunately, I don’t have to choose.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 24 readers
PUBLISHER:	Mariner Books; 1 edition (August 13, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Friederike Knabe
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Granta page on Chinelo Okparanta
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another collection of short stories: That Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro

Bibliography:

• Happiness, Like Water (August 2013)

“My mother said briskly, “After you take everything upstairs, Missak, you return the cart to Donabedian as soon as possible. Maral, put the spices in the jars, and the sugar on the top shelf. The rest goes wherever you and Auntie Shakeh find space.”

That was how our war began. It didn’t start with blaring newspaper headlines announcing a pending invasion, nor was it signaled by the drone of warplanes overhead. Our war commenced that afternoon when my mother stockpiled groceries so that, no matter what this new war might bring, her family would have something to eat.”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte  (JAN 7, 2014)

The setting is World War II Paris — when the Germans begin their occupation of the city, the protagonist of this story is just turning sixteen. Maral Pegorian and her older brother, Missak, are part of an Armenian family displaced to France after the Armenian genocide. They are stateless refugees and have made the suburb of Belleville in Paris, their home. Maral’s father is a cobbler and owns a small shoe shop hoping to one day pass on his skills to his son.

Missak, on the other hand, has different plans. He is a skilled artist and wants to work as an apprentice at the local print shop while spending most of his time secretly helping the French resistance. As a girl from a fairly conservative family, Maral can’t do much to help her brother, even if she sometimes wishes she could. “Was this to be my lot? Stuck in an apartment knitting or sewing or cooking while waiting for the men to come back from some adventure? It made me want to take the kitchen plates and throw them out the window just to hear them smash into a thousand pieces on the cobblestones below,” she laments.

Easily the smartest in the family, Maral goes through school even with the war progressing all around her, and towards the end of the story, graduates with an offer of admission to one of France’s most prestigious universities.

The Pegorian family’s fate is not unique to Paris or even to Armenians. Their neighbors, the Kacherians (also Armenian) are scraping the barrel to get by as are the many mixed families (including Jewish folks) in the neighborhood. Food is hard to come by — it’s mostly bulgur and turnips that the Pegorians manage to finagle with their ration card. There’s hardly any butter or meat to be had and even onions can be a rare delicacy. Despite the evident sufferings of the citizens during the Occupation, the children somehow manage to be themselves. Maral, in fact, falls in love with Zaven, one of the Kacherian sons, and Missak’s best friend. The two meet surreptitiously and pledge themselves to each other. Yet the best laid plans don’t always come to fruition.

Zaven and his older brother, Barkev, are swept up by the force of history and spend time in a German camp which changes them forever. The war crimes they witness leave permanent scars on their psyches — and ripples from these will eventually touch everyone they know including Maral.

History plays out in more than one way in this touching novel by Nancy Kricorian. With the weight of the Armenian genocide on their shoulders, the Armenian families in All The Light There Was, only want to lie low and not be subject to more tragedies. Maral’s parents have witnessed the horrors of the massacre personally and understandably it defines their life perspective in many subtle ways. When a Jewish family next door is rounded up by the Germans, the Pegorians hide the youngest girl in that family in their own apartment until the child is ready to be shipped to her aunt in Nice.

The Armenians in Maral’s generation might be removed from the immediate horrors of the Armenian genocide but they use the lessons learned from it to know that survival depends on many complicated factors. They are not ready to judge when they see their fellow brethren wear the American or the German uniform in the war.

In the end this story is a coming-of-age tale about Maral, a girl of promise at the novel’s start but who gradually gets worn down as the story moves along. “This is the story of how we lived the war, and how I found my husband,” Maral says at the beginning. The path toward finding her husband is not necessarily the most optimal but of course this is wartime and everyone’s lives are shaped by it. For someone who was fairly strong-willed at the beginning, it is a little frustrating, if understandable, to see Maral give up her education and instead fall into what comes more easily.

All The Light There Was is told through Maral’s voice and her perspective. In one sense, since she doesn’t do much except to bear witness to events that happen around her, this point of view feels limiting at times. The lens is never trained away from Maral and it occasionally gets claustrophobic. Yet it is precisely because the story is told through Maral’s voice, that the reader gets to feel what life was like for everyday citizens in occupied Paris. You realize that even during the worst wars, life can plod along — and even shine through — with grace. The beautiful cover art in this book drives home the point gracefully. Maral and her boyfriend are up front, lost in each other, while the rest of Paris goes on around them. You realize that while teenagers are often self-centered anyway, in times of war, this can be an essential mechanism to get through its many tribulations.

Ultimately the story ends with a ray of hope. “This world is made of dark and light, my girl, and in the darkest times you have to believe the sun will come again, even if you yourself don’t live to see it,” Maral’s father once tells her. As the reader turns the last page, you hope that the sun will indeed come again and shine down on the young and vibrant Armenians.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 57 readers
PUBLISHER:	Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (March 12, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Nancy Kricorian
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More Armenian history: Skylark Farm by Antonia Aslan The Last Day of War by Judith Claire Mitchell More occupied Paris: The Paris Architect by Charles Belfoure

Bibliography:

• Zabelle (1998)
• Dreams of Bread and Fire (2003)
• All the Light There Was (March 2013)

“He was not the first seeker of treasure upon the landscape, was instead but one more in the continuum of a story begun long ago by far greater desires than his own.”

Book Review:

Review by Jana L. Perskie (DEC 23, 2013)

All The Land To Hold Us is an apt title whose protagonist is the land – and it is a strange and powerful land. The harsh desert environment of West Texas is extremely arid, bitter and bleak. This environment shapes much of the novel’s character and the characters’ characters. The area receives much less rainfall than the rest of Texas and the temperature has been known to hit 120ºF in the summer. “An easterner, after making the stage trip and experiencing the danger of Horsehead and the Trans-Pecos country, wrote to friends back home that he now knew where hell was.” The setting also includes Castle Gap and Juan Cordoba Lake, an inland salt lake.

This is also a tale of those who live on the desert’s edge, where riches — oil, water, precious artifacts & love — can all be found and lost again in an instant. It is a sweeping saga of old Texas oil fields, salt mines, small town morality, and love.

The characters in All the World to Hold Us span three generations. Richard is a young and talented geologist who works for a Midland oil company. He is driven by his need to hunt for oil and fossils beneath the earth’s surface and by his love for his girlfriend Clarissa. Clarissa, a beautiful girl from Odessa, dreams of fleeing the broiling sun of the Permian Basin and moving to Hollywood, where she hopes her great beauty will make her a model or a movie star. She slathers on sun screen many times each day to protect her skin so that the harsh sunlight will not mar her beauty. She hunts for fossils, with Richard, in the burning desert. Richard keeps what he collects, but Clarissa sells her million-year-old fossils to museums. As there is no dialogue here and little character development, I really have no idea who Richard and Clarissa are.

Herbert Mix is an elderly one-legged museum owner. He is greedy for gold and anything one might find while looking for it: bones, animal fossils, arrowheads, knife blades, clay pots, wagon wheels, coins, and human skulls, which he values most of all and refuses to sell.

A Depression-era couple Max and Marie Omo, and their two sons, live in another time on this bone-strewn land. Max and his sons make their living by trapping, harvesting, and selling Juan Cordona Lake’s salt. The entire family, Marie, Max’s lonely wife, and their sons, are transformed by their surroundings. The lake water they drink is brackish. The food, not much better. And for Marie, the loneliness of the place is devastating. Marie, like Clarissa, wants out of the harsh life in their desert salt pan home.

“WHENEVER THE SALTCUTTER, Max Omo, encountered bounty in that land of deprivation—be it salt or the heat, almost igneous in nature, that wrung all but the last of the water from his body and sent it in sheets down his chest and back—he fell even harder in love with the salt, without even realizing that was what it was, falling into the clefts between the bounty of one thing and the deprivation of another, falling through an incandescent pluming kaleidoscope of colors that belied completely the physical constraints of his salt-colored life and his methodical movements above.”

Oddly, in passing, a runaway circus elephant, makes his appearance, as does his Indian trainer. Bizarre – but this incident brings some humor and a bit of sadness to the novel.

Rick Bass paints a vivid portrait of a fierce place and the inimitable characters who populate it….who survive it. They possess the capacity to adapt to and also despoil it the land. The author’s prose is lyrical and lush, at times poetic. Mr. Bass brings much of his geologist background to the novel; he is the son of a geologist, and he studied petroleum geology at Utah State University.

Bass has won many literary awards.  He won the 1995 James Jones Literary Society First Novel Fellowship for his novel Where the Sea Used to Be. He was a finalist for the Story Prize in 2006 for his short story collection The Lives of Rocks.  And he was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award (autobiography) for Why I Came West. He was also awarded the General Electric Younger Writers Award, a PEN/Nelson Algren Award Special Citation for fiction.

I previously read  The Ninemile Wolves and The Sky, the Stars, the Wilderness by this same author and I really enjoyed them and respect Mr. Bass as the talented, award-winning writer he is. However, I do not think he is up to par in his latest offering. When I reached page 84 in Book One, (the novel is made up of 3 Books), I found that I was plodding along – simply bored with the characters and storyline. This first third of Bass’ novel is a dense and difficult read. It is all narrative, no dialogue. The point of view is that of an omniscient observer.

When I reached the infamous page 84, an image came to mind. I was in an art gallery, or an art museum, and viewing the work of a famous, much lauded artist. “Objectively,” I recognized the paintings for their worth. I believed that the critics’ and other viewers’ praise was on the money.   “Subjectively,” the work left me cold. It didn’t touch me personally. I thought of an artist, perhaps someone like Jackson Pollack, and know many art lovers who think his paintings are the work of genius…and they might be. While recognizing the greatness of Mr. Pollack’s work, I am untouched by his paintings. So it is with  All The Land To Hold Us. I  appreciate the excellence of the author’s prose and the novelty of the story he tells…but I am not moved by any of this. I have now finished reading the novel and understand, objectively, why so many people would praise it well. However, I am left feeling that the novel has added little to my life, except for the knowledge I acquired reading about the “Land.” I did complete the novel as it improved in Books 2 and 3.

While this one is not a favorite of mine, I do recognize that many people might feel otherwise. And, as I just wrote, the authors writing is outstanding – subjectively and objectively….just a bit dense and slow paced at times.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 12 readers
PUBLISHER:	Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (August 13, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Jana L. Perskie
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Rick Bass
EXTRAS:	Daily Beast interview with Rick Bass
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Nashville Chrome And another big Texas novel: The Son by Philipp Meyer

Bibliography:

• The Watch: Stories (1989)
• Platte River (1994)
• In the Loyal Mountains: Stories (1997)
• The Sky, the Stars, the Wilderness (1997)
• Fiber (1998)
• Where the Sea Used to Be (1998)
• The Hermit’s Story (2003)
• The Diezmo (2005)
• The Blue Horse: Novella (2005)
• Nashville Chrome (2010)
• The Lives of Rocks: Stories (2008)
• All the Land to Hold Us (October 2013)

Non-fiction:

• The Deer Pasture (1985)
• Wild to the Heart (1988)
• Oil Notes (1989)
• Winter: Notes from Montana (1991)
• The Ninemile Wolves (1992)
• The Lost Grizzlies: The Search for Survivors in the Wilderness of Colorado (1995)
• The Book of Yaak (1996)
• The New Wolves: The Return of Mexican Wolf to the American Southwest (1998)
• Brown Dog of the Yaak : Essays on Art and Activism (1999)
• Colter: The True Story of the Best Dog I Ever Had (2000)
• The Roadless Yaak: Reflections and Observations About One of Our Last Great Wild Places (2002)
• Why I Came West (2008)
• Caribou Rising: Defending the Porcupine Herd, Gwich-‘in Culture, and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (2004)
• The Wild Marsh: Four Seasons at Home in Montana (2009)
• The Black Rhinos of Namibia: Searching for Survivors of the African Desert (2012)

“Daddy hadn’t meant to hurt her, she knew. Even Momma believed this, which was why she hadn’t called 911. And when the doctor at the ER had asked Lisette how her face had got so bruised, her nose and eye socket broken, she’d said that it was an accident on the stairs – she’ been running and she’d fallen.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (OCT 5, 2011)

This year’s editor of The Best American Short Stories 2011 is Geraldine Brooks, an accomplished journalist and fiction writer. She says of her selections “that the easiest and the first choices were the stories to which I had a physical response.” I would agree that the best stories in this collection are those that are most visceral and physical in nature. Ms. Brooks also states that “In the end, the stories I fell upon with perhaps the greatest delight were the outliers, the handful or so that defied the overwhelming gravitational pull toward small-canvas contemporary realism.”

There are twenty stories in this alphabetically arranged collection. About half of them swept me away and the other half didn’t move me as much as I’d hoped they would. Each year, I look forward to this collection with much anticipation and excitement. This year’s collection felt a bit below par in consistency and quality.

I agree with Ms. Brooks that the best stories in this collection are those to which I had a physical response. They tended towards themes of violence and/or grief. One such story is by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. In “Ceiling,” she writes about a man who realizes he is in the wrong life. He feels lassitude in his marriage which is superficial and without depth. He yearns for his college sweetheart who he’s built up in his mind as perfect. As Ms. Brooks states, this story “perfectly captures the yearning spirit of a man who has settled for the wrong wife, the wrong life, in the stultifying salons of Lagos’s corrupt upper class.”

In “Housewifely Arts” by Megan Mayhew Bergman, a single mother drives nine hours to visit her dead mother’s parrot because the parrot is so perfectly able to mimic her mother’s voice. The parrot has more of her mother inside her than the daughter does.

Nathan Englander’s story, “Free Fruit for Young Widows,” opens with a violent act and continues with acts of violence. The story examines the roots of violence as it explores the possibilities and rationales that make violence an appropriate act. Part tale of vengeance and part philosophy, the reader puzzles the situations as does the young son whose father is telling him the story.

Allegra Goodman’s “La Vita Nuova” is a haunting story of grief. A woman who is a children’s art teacher is left by her fiancé. She brings her wedding dress to school and lets her students paint all over it. The story is about the depths of grief and loss.

“Soldier of Fortune” by Bret Anthony Johnston tells about Josh, a high school freshman who is in love with his neighbor Holly, a senior. When Holly’s three year-old brother accidentally gets severely scalded by boiling water and the family has to spend weeks at the hospital, Josh takes care of their home and dog. He grows up during this pivotal time.

In “Peter Torrelli, Falling Apart,” by Rebecca Makai, a man and his friend, Peter, have known each other since high school. Both are gay and they initially bonded over that commonality. Peter was beautiful and charismatic and went on to become an actor. At one of his performances he has a meltdown and can’t work again. His friend gives his all to Peter getting nothing in return. The reader wonders why his friend would risk so much for Peter.

Joyce Carol Oates, in “ID,” tells about Lisette, an eighth-grader who is recovering from a shattered eye socket and broken nose incurred by a beating from her estranged father. Lisette lives with her mother, a black jack dealer in Atlantic City. Lisette’s mother has been gone for several days, leaving Lisette alone with no idea of when she’ll be back or where she went. The police appear at her school and ask her to ID a corpse that they think might be her mother.

George Saunders writes about prisoners who are used in an experiment where they are given psychoactive drugs that take them to the deepest recesses of their souls. “Escape from Spiderland” is about these prisoners, the experiment, and the feelings of ultimate love, eloquence and sexuality that these drugs render. The prisoners can be brought to the depths of despair and the height of exaltation and then returned to their baselines in a few seconds.

Overall, there are some very good stories in this collection and some that are just mediocre. The ones that stand out are definitely the ones that feel like a visceral gut punch and that pound on the reader’s psyche. Ms. Brooks did not want “small-canvas contemporary realism” but sometimes it is the small canvas that shows the most detail and beauty. One just needs to look at it from the right angle.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 18 readers
PUBLISHER:	Mariner Books (October 4, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Best American Short Stories
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Best American Stories 2010 edited by Richard Russo Our reviews of some of Geraldine Brooks’ novels: Caleb’s Crossing People of the Book

Partial Bibliography:

• The Best American Short Stories 2000 edited by E.L. Doctorow  (October 2000)
• The Best American Short Stories 2001 edited by Barbara Kingsolver  (October 2001)
• The Best American Short Stories 2002 edited by Sue Miller  (October 2002)
• The Best American Short Stories 2003 edited by Walter Mosley  (October 2003)
• The Best American Short Stories 2004 edited by Lorrie Moore (October 2004)
• The Best American Short Stories 2005 edited by Michael Chabon  (October 2006)
• The Best American Short Stories 2006 edited by Ann Patchett   (October 2006)
• The Best American Short Stories 2007 edited by Stephen King  (October 2007)
• The Best American Short Stories 2008 edited by Salman Rushdie  (October 2008)
• The Best American Short Stories 2009 edited by Alice Sebold  (October 2009)
• The Best American Short Stories 2010 edited by Richard Russo (September 2010)
• The Best American Short Stories 2011 edited by Geraldine Brooks (September 2011)

“Only a madman unaware of what he was doing would admit to being directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds and thousands of people and then behave as if nothing had happened.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  (OCT 4, 2011)

Saramago’s last, indeed posthumous, book is a real treat. Brief, inventive, funny, it furthers the author’s well-known distaste for religious dogma by traversing many of the familiar stories of the Old Testament by means of a fanciful parable told from a rational point of view. Much like The Elephant’s Journey, it shows Saramago’s stylistic fingerprints in relaxed form. There are still the run-on sentences, but they are the product of irrepressible exuberance rather than philosophic density. There is a lot more dialogue than usual, but, liberated by the author’s minimal punctuation, it propels the page forward rather than breaking it up. And his avoidance of capitals (except to start sentences and dialogue) has the familiar effect of demystifying his various beings — most especially god — making them earn respect rather than being granted it automatically. He treats the lord as an omnipotent but rather amateur bungler, forever tinkering with his unsatisfactory creation, as here with Noah’s ark:

“God was not there for the launch. He was busy examining the planet’s hydraulic system, checking the state of the valves, tightening the odd loose screw that was dripping where it shouldn’t, testing the various local distribution networks, keeping an eye on the manometers, as well as dealing with tens of myriads of other tasks, large and small, each of them more important than the last, and which only he, as creator, engineer and administrator of the universal mechanisms, was in a position to carry out and to which only he could give the sacred ok.”

Saramago’s most audacious stroke is to choose the outcast murderer Cain as his protagonist. He has him argue successfully that at least half the blame for Abel’s murder should be shouldered by god (let’s stick with lowercase) for his unreasonable provocation. Condemned to wander the earth as a kind of compromise, Cain finds the rest of the Middle East quite adequately populated already; it appears that the Garden of Eden was not the beginning of anything, simply god’s private experiment. Other than an extended amorous interlude with the capricious Queen Lilith, Cain will jump around in the Bible story, turning up at most of the key events of Genesis, and several from other books of the Old Testament also. Sometimes he gets there only in the nick of time, as when the official angel arrives too late to prevent the sacrifice of Isaac, and Cain himself has to intervene.

The middle sections of the book are rather episodic, and I was not entirely convinced by Saramago’s choice of just these episodes in just that order. But it gradually becomes clear that Cain’s role is to be a witness, and — murderer though he is — a moral conscience that Saramago’s god himself lacks. The chosen stories focus on god’s capriciousness, apparent unconcern for human life, and willingness to accept any amount of collateral damage in pursuit of his goals. Cain cannot understand how the killing of one’s son can be a worthwhile test of anything; would god be willing to sacrifice his own son? (Well, yes.) How can god think that giving Job another set of sons and daughters can replace the ones he has arbitrarily destroyed, as though family, like wealth, were a fungible commodity? Cain is haunted by the cries of the innocent children slaughtered along with their Sodomite parents. He leaves Joshua’s army in horror at the massacre of combatants and non-combatants alike, and the capture of virgins for other purposes. Finally, having been brought onto the ark by Noah, he takes matters into his own hands directly, standing up to god once more face-to-face.

So a fun book with a serious message. From any other writer, it would be a wonder; from Saramago, though, little more than a jeu d’esprit. Compared to his rewriting of the New Testament in The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, a complex book which proves by no means hostile to religion even while denouncing the official manifestations of it, this seems little more than a whimsical after-dinner entertainment. But I would have happily gone to dinner with Saramago any time, and listened to his stories for as long as he cared to tell them. (Translated by Margaret Jull Costa.)

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 25 readers
PUBLISHER:	Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; None edition (October 4, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on José Saramago
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Elephant’s Journey The Double The Cave

Bibliography:

• Baltasar and Blimunda (1982, translated 1987)
• The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (1991)
• The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (1993)
• Manual of Painting and Calligraphy: A Novel (1994)
• The Stone Raft (1994)
• The History of the Siege of Lisbon (1996)
• Blindness (1997)
• The Tale of the Unknown Island (1999)
• All the Names (2000)
• The Cave (2002)
• The Double (2004)
• Seeing (2006)
• Death with Interuptions (2008)
• The Elephant’s Journey (2010)
• Cain (2009; 2011)
• Manual of Painting and Calligraphy (2012)
• Raised from the Ground (2012)

Other:

• A Journey to Portugal (2001)

“Who’d chook a boy just to get his Chicken Joe’s?”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte  (SEP 14, 2011)

Around ten years ago, a young Nigerian immigrant, 10-year-old Damilola Taylor, was beaten by boys barely older than him in Peckham, a district in South London. Damilola later bled to death. The incident sparked outrage in the United Kingdom and was subsequently pointed to as proof that the country’s youth had gone terribly astray.

The same incident seems to have also inspired a debut novel, Pigeon English, with 11-year-old Harri Opoku filling in for the voice of Damilola Taylor. As the book opens, Harri has recently emigrated from Ghana to London with his older sister and his mother. Dad and younger sister and the rest of the family are still in the native country and Harri is often brought back to his home country through extended phone calls exchanged between the two sides.

Like most children, Harri is not privy to the intricate goings-on in the lives around him. It’s a fact made worse by the displacement brought about by immigration. Harri must not just figure out the ways of the world, he must do so in a new place where the rules of the game are entirely unfamiliar. Even if life in the ghetto is painful and lived in extreme poverty, Harri finds plenty to keep him in good spirits. For one thing, he wants to try every kind of Haribo (candy) in the store close to him.

Even better he has struck a tentative friendship with a local boy, Dean. With Dean’s help, Harri is determined to solve a recent crime—one where a kid like himself is found brutally murdered in a struggle over a fast food meal. The devastating tragedy affects Harri deeply and he is determined (in a typical naïve and childish way) to find the killers. Unfortunately he gets too close to the real killers—people who might not appreciate interference from a bright-eyed curious kid.

Pigeon English is narrated through Harri’s voice so the English is broken and mixed in with special words whose meanings become apparent only after a few readings. “Bo-styles” for example, means very good while “Asweh” is the more readily understandable, “I swear.”

Harri’s musings and experiences can be funny at one moment and heartbreaking the next. Author Stephen Kelman has done a terrific job in capturing the boy’s voice. The problem with Pigeon English is that the same voice eventually becomes a distraction. It never becomes seamless enough so the reader can concentrate on what the boy is saying—you’re forever hung up on how he’s saying it. And of course there are times when he says too much: “I can make a fart like a woodpecker. Asweh, it’s true. The first time it happened was an accident. I was just walking along and I did one fart, but then it turned into lots of little farts all chasing it.” Did we really need to know that?

It was entirely a coincidence that I read this novel right around the time that the London riots made headline news around the world. As was reported by the New York Times and other news outlets, it was the youth who were the primary looters and criminals in these riots—an effect brought about by a “combination of economic despair, racial tension and thuggery.” The riots, the paper reported, “reflect the alienation and resentment of many young people in Britain.” Read at this particular moment in history, Pigeon English then seems much more than a fairly good read—it also comes across as an important one. One can’t help but wonder how much the timely relevance of its subject matter lead Pigeon English to be shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize this year.

“I made the choice, nobody forced me,” says Harri’s mother about the decision to move her kids to London from Ghana. “I did it for me, for these children. As long as I pay my debt they’re safe and sound. They grow up to reach further than I could ever carry them.” Pigeon English is a moving novel not just because it is a stark story about London’s ghettos, but because it reminds us that for many in the developing world, a move to this kind of a hell is actually a move up.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 24 readers
PUBLISHER:	Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1 edition (July 19, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Stephen Kelman
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Londonstani by Gautam Malkani

Bibliography:

• Pigeon English (July 2011)

“How quickly it can change, the life we think has been marked out for us. We start the journey with good intentions, the gift our parents bequeathed us. And then, someone snaps their fingers and we find ourselves sidetracked; we end up in a foreign country.”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowsky AUG 10, 2011)

Karin Fossum’s Bad Intentions is about three friends, now in their twenties, who have known each other since they were six. On the surface, Axel Frimann is by far the most successful. He is well-spoken, good-looking, nicely dressed, and drives a Mercedes; his job at an advertising agency pays well. Philip Reilly, on the other hand, is disheveled, has long, stringy hair (“he looked like a troll from a fairy tale”), and spends a portion of his small salary as a hospital porter getting high. The third member of the trio is Jon Moreno.

As the story opens, Jon is with his two buddies at a cabin near a lake ominously called “Dead Water.” Reilly and Frimann have taken Jon out of the hospital ward where he is being treated for depression and anxiety; the doctors hope that the change of scenery will speed Jon’s recovery.

The three men share a dark secret, one that would land them in deep trouble if it came to light. Their transgression preys on Reilly and Moreno, while Frimann’s chief concern is how to keep his pals from blabbing and ruining his life. The dynamics of control—self-control and the control of others—drives the story. Some men are leaders and others are followers. For certain individuals, it is easier to let someone else make the decisions than it is to take a stand. Fossum is keenly aware that any of us, in certain circumstances, can do something that we will forever regret. Certain people rationalize their actions and blithely carry on as if nothing has happened, while those who possess a sense of morality may become mired in guilt. They can escape only when they unburden themselves and try to atone.

Inspector Konrad Sejer and Jakob Skarre are called in when one of the men goes missing. Sejer interviews the victim’s family and acquaintances, but although he has his suspicions, he has little hard evidence to go on. The inspector thinks, “I’ve developed a profound skepticism and it follows me everywhere. I don’t trust anyone.” When another body turns up, Sejer’s suspicions deepen, and soon matters come to a head in an unexpected manner.

Karin Fossum demonstrates that justice comes in many forms and is often meted out in unlikely ways. In addition, she poignantly touches on how two grieving mothers find a measure of consolation after they lose their beloved children. Bad Intentions, translated capably from the Norwegian by Charlotte Barslund, is a subtle and heartbreaking tale of psychological suspense in which Fossum explores not only the nature of good and evil, but also the power of guilt to insidiously destroy a person from within.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 36 readers
PUBLISHER:	Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1 edition (August 9, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Eleanor Bukowsky
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Karin Fossum
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Indian Bride When the Devil Holds the Candle Who Fears the Wolf Don’t Look Back

Bibliography:

The Inspector Sejer & Inspector Jakob Skarre Series:

• Eve’s Eye (1995)
• Don’t Look Back (1996; 2004 in US)
• He Who Fears the Wolf (1997; 2005 in US)
• When the Devil Holds the Candle (1998; 2006 in US)
• The Indian Bride (2000; July 2007 in US)
• Black Seconds (2008)
• The Water’s Edge (2009)
• Bad Intentions (August 2011)

Other:

• The House of the Insane (1999)
• The Nightmare of November 4th (2004)
• Broken (2006; August 2010 in US)
• The House of Fools (2008)

“Americans are fundamentally unhappy, and they are fundamentally unhappy because they suffer from institutional addiction. If you consider the comfort (for most), the wealth (relative), and opportunities (many) with which Americans have matured, it is mind-boggling to consider that anybody here could be unhappy. ”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte  (JUN 16, 2011)

One of Zeke Pappas’s biggest heroes is Joseph Cornell, an artist who created “assemblages”—most of Cornell’s work were glass-fronted boxes filled with a stunning variety of found objects. Zeke loves Cornell because he “devoted his life to the collecting the unhappy scraps left behind by others and trying to distill them and make sense of them. Cornell’s work to me is about our abandonment of joy, about our reckless inability to hold on to something meaningful. This is an attempt to find meaning—no, to find magic—in our collective dross, in the castoff and the forgotten,” Zeke says during one of his annual visits to the Cornell boxes collection at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Cornell might well have served as inspiration for Zeke, who works at a mundane job in Madison, Wisconsin. After all, like Cornell, Zeke too wants to find the “magic in our collective dross.” To this end, Zee’s latest (and what he assumes will be his most enduring) work is documenting the unhappiness shared by his fellow Americans. He creates a project called the American Unhappiness Project, which simply documents responses to the question: “Why are you unhappy?” The project is funded by the Midwestern Humanities Initiative an institution that was created in the heyday of the roaring ‘90s but one that is fast fading into irrelevance in the late Bush years in which this novel is set. Responses to that elemental question, as one can imagine, are vast and varied and Zeke whiles away his time collecting and cataloging them all. His office assistant, the comely Lara, is also quite irrelevant to the project, and she knows it. As the institution and the project slowly wind down to their collective last breath, she tries in vain to alert Zeke about the impending disaster.

But Zeke has problems of his own. Back home, his mother is dying from cancer and he takes care of his orphaned grade-school-aged nieces. Zeke himself is a widower—his wife, Valerie Somerville, mysteriously disappeared on a boating trip many years ago. So it is only natural that Zeke wants a sense of normalcy in his life. “Lately when I see [my] friends, attacked by sticky fingers in a loud family restaurant near the Hilldale mall or struggling to change a diaper in the Borders bathroom, I feel not superiority and the tickle of my ample freedom but a searing feeling of envy and loss,” he says. “I want that, I think. That’s what I want.”

This “want” is further accelerated when his mother crafts a will naming Zeke’s sister-in-law Melody, as the potential guardian of the children. There’s hope however. Were Zeke to marry before mom dies, custody reverts back to him. So now Zeke is on a focused mission. With the help of a women’s magazine called Simply You, he makes a list of prospects and tries to woo them serially.

Chief among these prospects is the barista at the local Starbucks, Minn, whom Zeke impresses by accurately predicting random customers’ orders. Starbucks, especially one that makes a well-crafted Americano, is one place where Zeke is relatively happy. “At least among a certain well-educated demographic, Starbucks is a ritual—costly and mildly unhealthy as it is—meant to mitigate our day-to-day unhappiness,” Zeke says.

As the novel moves along, the Feds increasingly hound Zeke—they need to find out exactly how he’s spending the taxpayers’ money after all. Even worse, the principal funder for the initiative, a local Wisconsin senator, has been engaging in inappropriate homosexual relationships with prostitutes.

Finally, Zeke is out on the streets and his flailing attempts to find a wife despite insurmountable odds, start to wear the reader down. My American Unhappiness becomes increasingly surreal towards the end and Zeke’s endless soapbox stances on George W. Bush begin to look like polemic rants. At one point in My American Unhappiness, when Zeke pronounces that he’s on a roll, his assistant Lara, says: “You certainly are. A roll of BS.” It’s tempting to agree with her somewhat.

One responder to the Unhappiness Project sends Zeke a clip from a Robert F. Kennedy speech in which Kennedy quotes playwright Aeschylus: “In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.” If wisdom were indeed to follow all that pain, Zeke’s is hard-won. There is definitely some measure of earned wisdom at the end, but it remains to see if Zeke will use it in constructive ways.

Bakopoulos is most definitely a talented writer but My American Unhappiness too often struggles under the weight of its own ironic asides. Like that famous artist, Joseph Cornell, Bakopoulos too is capable of picking up the everyday and turning it into magic. Fortunately for the reader, there are a few—though not nearly enough—flashes of that very same magic in My American Unhappiness.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 6 readers
PUBLISHER:	Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1 edition (June 7, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Dean Bakopoulos
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk Happiness™ by Will Ferguson

Bibliography:

• Please Don’t Come Back from the Moon (2005)
• My American Unhappiness (June 2011)

“Her face had only one expression, and she used it to conceal the two major emotions of her life, resentment and love. They were so violently opposed, these passions, that she could not move from one to the other; she lacked flexibility; so she inhabited a grim inexpressive no-man’s-land between them, feeling in some way that she thus achieved a kind of justice.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (MAY 26, 2011)

Margaret Drabble is a well-known English novelist. I have read several of her books and have always enjoyed them. I had no idea that she was also a writer of short stories. A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman is the first compilation of her stories that has ever been published. They are presented in chronological order beginning in 1964 and ending in 2000. Like her novels, these stories often deal with the plight of women in their times, the socio-cultural aspects of marriage, and the difficulties that women find themselves in while trying to both raise a family and be successful in the business world. The stories are distinctively English;  the countryside of England as well as the urban landscapes are vivid throughout. There is a span of thirty-six years between the first short story and the last, giving the themes a relatively large period of time in which to develop.

The first story is entititled “Les Liaisons Dangereuses.” Humphrey had met a man at a pub who invited him to a party and when he came to the door, the host acted like he didn’t even know him. “It was the kind of party at which nobody got introduced.” The party was comprised of clusters of people who all seemed to know one another and the conversations that Humphrey overheard were artistic and intellectual. Humphrey knew no one and no one tried to make his acquaintance. Humphrey sets his sights on a long-haired red-headed woman who is waxing pontifically to a group gathered around her. He never knew if it was accident or inspiration that caused him to set her hair on fire but this act gained him exalted entrance to the entourage.

In “A Voyage to Cythera” we watch Helen who loves to travel. Whether it’s 30 miles or to another country, traveling is Helen’s gift in life. She likes the feeling of moving, be it in a car, train, or plane. Traveling opens a new world for her – one of possible intimacy, adventure and the potential of becoming someone other than the lonely, bland person she is.

In “A Pyrrhic Victory,” a young woman is adventuring with three others, trying to be what they want her to be. She represses her own needs and expectations. She finds herself taking on the weight and pain of acting according to what others want rather than risk being herself and seeming uncool or gauche.

“Crossing the Alps” is about two lovers who work together and are having an illicit affair. They are planning to travel from England to Yugosolavia. He comes down with a bad cold and sees her strengths and abilities as she cares for him. It is impossible for them to be together outside this week’s vacation as he is married. He has a lot of difficulty understanding her strength and resourcefulness in the face of her difficult life.

“The Gifts of War” is about a woman who is in a joyless marriage with an abusive husband. Her son is her only solace, her pride and joy. As she sets off to get him an expensive and totally inappropriate birthday present, she reminisces about the time during the Vietnam War when she not only protested the war, but toys of violence.

A well-known female English playwright meets an even more well-known American literary figure in “A Success Story.” He is known for his womanizing and comes on to her at a party. This coming on means more to her than having an intellectual conversation. She is happily married and things don’t go anywhere but she feels good that she is desired. The male character is based on the American novelist Saul Bellow.

“A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman” is about a woman who gets a job with her husband’s help at a television station. With time, she becomes very successful and gets to have her own show. Her husband becomes jealous and begins to despise her, sometimes even hitting her in her sleep. She carries herself well and usually has a smile on her face along with a look of success. Inside, however, she feels physically and emotionally ill. Her only comfort is her children who she gets to see very little of because of her grueling work schedule.

“The Merry Widow” is about Elsa who has just been widowed. Her husband was a mean emotionally abusive spouse and Elsa is glad that he is dead. She goes on a vacation alone that they had planned together and has a wonderful time until an old man with a scythe starts working the land. She realizes over time that she has mistaken him for “death” when he’s really a representative of “Father Time.” She is then able to enjoy herself again and look forward to the future.

Many of these stories are about the inner lives of women. The action takes place in their thoughts, hopes and dreams. It is very clear that what is seen on the outside is frequently very different from what is going on inside. Some of the stories seem like sketches for Drabble’s novels, ways for her to work out the characterizations. As a fan of Ms. Drabble, I loved this collection and feel privileged to have read it. I hope that more of her short stories come to light.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 14 readers
PUBLISHER:	Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (May 18, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Margaret Drabble
EXTRAS:	Excerpt Wikipedia page on Margaret Drabble
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Red Queen

Bibliography:

• A Summer Bird Cage (1963)
• The Garrick Year (1964)
• The Millstone (1965)
• Jerusalem the Golden (1967)
• The Waterfall (1969)
• The Needle’s Eye (1972)
• The Realms of Gold (1975)
• The Ice Age (1977)
• The Middle Ground (1980)
• The Radiant Way (1987) *
• A Natural Curiousity (1989) *
• The Gates of Ivory (1992) *
• The Witch of Exmoor (1997)
• The Peppered Moth (2001)
• The Seven Sisters (2002)
• The Red Queen (2004)
• A Summer Bird-Cage (2006)
• The Sea Lady (2007)
• A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman : Stories (2011)
• The Pure Gold Baby (October 2013)

*Trilogy describing the experiences of three friends living through the 80s

Nonfiction:

• For Queen and Country: Britain in the Victorian Age (1978)
• A Writer’s Britain: Landscape in Literature (1979)
• Safe as Houses (1990)
• The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History with Jigsaws (2009)