“That’s it. 1984 and 1Q84 are fundamentally the same in terms of how they work. If you don’t believe in the world, and if there is no love in it, then everything is phony. No matter which world we are talking about, no matter what kind of world we are talking about, the line separating fact from hypothesis is practically invisible to the eye. It can only be seen with the inner eye, the eye of the mind.”

Book Review:

Review by Devon Shepherd  (DEC 31, 2011)

Haruki Murakami doesn’t lend himself to easy categorization. Though his prose is spare, almost styleless, it’s more supple than muscular, and though his stories are often occupied with mundane domesticities, they’re also often founded in the surreal. It’s no surprise, then, that Murakami’s long-awaited latest, 1Q84, isn’t easy to shelf –it’s at home among either fantasy, thriller or hard-boiled noir – but one thing’s for sure: this book is grotesquely Murakami. That is, quiet domesticity punctuates adventures tenuously connected to reality, and yet for all its faults – and some have argued there are many – this is a book that haunts you long after you’re done, a book that, like a jealous lover, won’t let you move on.

For all its parallel worlds and magical creatures, for all its anonymous sex and ruthless violence, this is a book about love. The lovers in question, Tengo and Aomame, haven’t seen or spoken to each other in almost 20 years. In fact, they may have never spoken at all. Their shared history is limited to a 5th grade incident during which a ten-year-old Aomame reached for Tengo’s hand – and stilled his soul. But for Tengo, a popular athlete and academic star, to befriend Aomame, a religious freak who stands up and shouts a version of the Lord’s Prayer before she eats lunch, would’ve been social suicide. Aomame transfers schools before Tengo acknowledges to himself what she means to him.

Twenty years pass – it’s 1984 – and Tengo, considered a math prodigy, has frittered away his promise: he teaches math at a Tokyo cram school while moonlighting as a novelist. Though he has weekly sex with a married girlfriend, he still wonders about Aomame.

Disowned by her family for breaking with their church, the Society of Witnesses, Aomame is a lone-wolf. She works as a fitness instructor at a swanky Tokyo gym and although she trolls for wild one-night stands, her heart, after all these years, still belongs to Tengo. As it turns out, she moonlights too –as an assassin. Under the auspices of a wealthy and mysterious dowager, Aomame, with a method of her own invention, kills wife-beaters and rapists.

The Tengo-Aomame attachment – their love itself – is absurd, and this absurdity calls into existence a strange alternative world – 1Q84, the world with a question mark – with a second, “moss-green” moon. Ostensibly, Aomame enters this alternate world, like Alice down the rabbit hole, when she escapes a gridlocked Metropolitan expressway by climbing down an emergency stairwell. But it’s Tengo, in ghost-writing the best-seller, Air Chryaslis, or perhaps in writing a novel of his own, that opens that portal. What has brought Tengo into 1Q84 isn’t entirely clear – although his skill as a storyteller is a factor – but, unbeknownst to the other, both are trapped in 1Q84, a world that becomes increasingly perilous.

When Komatsu, Tengo’s editor, suggests Tengo rewrite a manuscript submission, a fantastical, but compelling story, told in substandard prose, Tengo is hesitant. The author, a strange and beautiful 17-year old girl, who goes by the name of Fuka-Eri, insists that her story, a tale about Little People who emerge from the mouth of a goat and weave wombs out of strands of reality, is true. The Little People use these wombs, or air chrysalises, to gestate doubles, or dohtas. The dohtas act like antennas of sorts, receivers for the perceivers of “the voice.” Fuka-Eri has no literary ambitions and gives Tengo permission to rewrite her work.

But when Air Chrysalis is a runaway hit, a powerful and mysterious cult, Sakigake, is angered. Although most people read the book as fantasy, Sakigake maintains that Fuka-Eri, the estranged daughter of their mysterious Leader, has revealed sacred truths not meant for outsiders. It seems they’ll stop at nothing to halt publication, but when their Leader is found dead, Sakigake must devote itself to finding his murderer.

As it turns out, the Leader is suspected of raping pre-pubescent girls, Fuka-Eri, his daughter, among them. The dowager charges Aomame with dispatching the Leader to “the other side,” but when he demonstrates his supernatural powers, Aomame becomes conflicted and confused. A telepath, the Leader knows Aomame’s intention, but the cost of his great gift is excruciating pain. The Leader welcomes death, and when Aomame hesitates, he bargains with her: his death for Tengo’s life. Unfortunately, killing the Leader will likely mean Aomame’s death too. But, in sacrificing her life for Tengo’s, their connection inexplicably tightens, and the danger Aomame flees inadvertently flings them together.

1Q84 is possible because of faith. It is the belief in love, in something beyond reason, something magical, that creates the metaphysical space for impossibilities to actualize themselves. Born from air chrysalises, dohtas are affectless shadows, without desires or dreams of their own. But we only need look around us, at the “hunched over people carried by force of habit into the new day” to see that it’s all too easy to lose your dreams and desires to the monotony of everyday life, individual passions and secret hopes lost to the roles we play – father, mother, teacher, banker – unaware that if you stop and look up, you might just see two moons. Of course, the real problem, as Tengo and Aomame figure out, is not the revelation of the magical, but how to steal a bit of that wonder up the rabbit hole, to the mundane world of day jobs and traffic jams.

Murakami shirks conventional expectations, refusing to answer the questions he poses and tie his loose ends into pretty little bows. He breaks from craft wisdom – stick to the essentials – with gratuitous descriptions and his characters repeatedly mull over the same plot points. He even challenges Chekov’s famous maxim by introducing a gun that never goes off. But I can’t help but feel that’s the point; life isn’t pared down to essentials, and insofar as our lives have meaning, they’re necessarily narratives, stories just as mundane – and hopefully just as magical, if not as fantastical – as this one.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 514 readers
PUBLISHER:	Knopf; First Edition edition (October 25, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Devon Shepherd
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Haruki Murakami
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: What I Talk About When I Talk About Running Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman After the Quake

Bibliography:

• Hear the Wind Sing (1979; translated 1987)
• Pinball 1973 (1980; translated 1985)
• The Wild Sheep Chase (1982; translated 1989)
• Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1985; translated 1991)
• The Norwegian Wood (1987; translated 1989 and 2000)
• Dance, Dance, Dance (1988; translated 1994)
• South of the Border, West of the Sun (1992; translated 1999)
• The Elephant Vanishes: Stories (translated 1993)
• The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994; translated 1997)
• Sputnik Sweetheart (1999; translated 2001)
• All God’s Children Can Dance (2000)
• After the Quake: Stories (2000; 2002 in US)
• Kafka on the Shore (2003; 2005 in US)
• Vintage Murakami (2004)
• Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman (2006)
• After Dark (2007)
• 1Q84 (October 2011)

Non-Fiction:

• Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche (1997; translated 2000)
• What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (2007)

Related:

• A Wild Haruki Chase: Reading Murakami Around the World (2008)

Movies from books:

• Tony Takitani (2005)

“This is not a book about the great Austrian physicist, Ludwig Boltzmann, nor, despite its importance in my life, is it about Antarctica. It is more about time and chance and the images and dreams we bring with us from childhood which shape who we are and what we become. It is about science and atoms and starry nights and what we think we remember, though we have made it up.”

Book Review:

Review by Bill Brody  (DEC 18, 2011)

Boltzmann’s Tomb: Travels in Search of Science by Bill Green is at once a travelogue and joyous celebration of science. The author is a chemist who has done significant research in the dry lakes of Antarctica. Boltzmann was a brilliant physicist and teacher, a pioneer in the study of entropy. He was an early champion for the atomic model of matter in the 19th century, to the derision of many of his peers. Ironically, he committed suicide at almost the same time as Einstein was doing his pioneering work on brownian motion. This work, unknown to Bolztmann, provided persuasive evidence for the atomic model by demonstrating the existence of tiny units of matter, so small they are invisible and yet energetic enough that they cause macroscopic dust particles to move randomly in water. The author notes that Boltzmann died in Duino, the same city where Rilke wrote his Duino Elegies, brilliant poetry of profound melancholy. Boltzmann and Rilke were kindred spirits in the sense that both suffered profound depression, and were tortured by self-doubt. More importantly, the two shared the supreme gift of being able to take experience and use their respective media of mathematics and written language creatively to express unique truths.

This short work is not intended to do justice to the arduous task of skeptical inquiry and the continuing cycle of intellectual labor turning observation into theory, theory into prediction, prediction into experiment that supports or falsifies the theory. What this book does is illuminate the spark that drives scientists, and it makes clear that science comes from the work of real people who are so moved by the mystery and magic of their experience that they will walk through the fire of scorn, self-doubt and in the case of Galileo, the very real fear of torture, to seek and speak truth.

Boltzmann’s entropy formula S= k*log(W) is carved onto his tomb. His work on entropy describes the relationship between what one can observe such as the temperature of a volume of gas and a statistical description of the more or less random states of tiny units such as the motion of the constituent molecules. His work on entropy metaphorically focuses our attention on the role of chance in our every endeavor. Chance encounters with scientists during the author’s travels as a younger man lead to opportunities such as the chance to work in Antarctica. The capacity for poetic wonder at the splendors of nature fueled his scientific career. The message is that what comes to everyone does so more or less by happenstance, but some find mystery and beauty in these chance encounters. Creative souls, the scientists and poets, are then inspired for a lifetime of expression.

Boltzmann’s Tomb is a scientific travelogue celebrating a number of pilgrimages to the places where great science was made. As we follow the author on his travels, we visit the Vienna of Boltzmann and so many others in science and the arts. We spend time in Galileo’s Florence, hometown of the Renaissance. Cambridge was home to Isaac Newton and Watson and Crick of DNA fame. We visit Prague where Copernicus and Kepler created the basis for modern astronomy and laid the groundwork for Newton’s description of gravity. Along the way we see the scientists as human beings, creatures of their place and time and inspired to transcend their beginnings by creating glorious structures of thought to explain the mysteries of the universe. We come to appreciate the passionate and poetic wonder that informs much of great science. Do yourself a favor and put this book on your shelf of inspirational literature.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 1 readers
PUBLISHER:	Bellevue Literary Press (June 14, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Bill Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Bill Green
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Hidden Reality by Brian Greene

Bibliography:

• Improbable Eden (2003)
• Water, Ice & Stone: Science and Memory on the Antarctic Lakes (2008)
• Boltzmann’s Tomb: Travels in Search of Science (June 2011)

“In the days when success in life had depended on marriage, and marriage had depended on money, novelists had a subject to write about. The great epics sang of war, the novels of marriage. Sexual equality, good for women, had been bad for the novel. And divorce had undone it completely…Where could you find the marriage plot nowadays?”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (NOV 16, 2011)

“Reader, I married him.”

What sensitive reader hasn’t thrilled to the last lines of the novel Jane Eyre, when the mousy and unprepossessing girl triumphantly returns to windswept Thornfield as a mature woman, marrying her one-time employer and great love, Mr. Rochester?

That era of these great wrenching love stories is now dead and gone. Or is it? Can these time-honored stories be rewritten for our current age, adapting to the accepted forces of sexual freedom and feminism? That’s the main focus of Jeffrey Eugenides’ new novel and the theme shows up early on. He writes about his key character: “Madeleine’s love troubles had begun at a time when the French theory she was reading deconstructed the very notion of love.”

You’d expect the author of the ground-breaking Virgin Suicides – a beautifully-rendered mythology about the suicides of five secluded sisters as seen through the eyes of neighborhood boys – and Middlesex, the exhilarating Pulitzer Prize winning multi-generational saga focusing on a hermaphrodite – to bring a fresh energy to the topic. And indeed, Mr. Eugenides does.

The” marriage plot” is a term used to categorize a storyline centered on the courtship rituals between a man and a woman and the potential obstacles they face on the way to the nuptial bed. It often involves a triangle – typically, the woman and man who are fated to be together and a strong rival for the woman’s attention.

So it is here. Madeline Hanna – the center of this new marriage plot — is a privileged Brown University student, a young English major whose books range from the complete Modern Library set of Henry James to “a lot of Dickens, a smidgen of Trollope, along with good helpings of Austen, George Eliot, and the redoubtable Bronte sisters.” Her brain is tantalized by her readings of deconstructions like Roland Barthes in her Semiotics 211; her heart, though, is firmly tethered to the literature of a century or two past. The other two sides of the love triangle are composed of Leonard Bankhead, a charismatic, sexually charged, intellectual, and intense college Darwinist, and Mitchell Grammaticus, the spiritually inclined seeker who has been delving into various religious mythologies including Christian mysticism.

But – Eugenides being Eugenides – someone who does not shy from complex characters – he adds a twist. Leonard is not only tall, dark and brooding (he wears a leather jacket, chews tobacco and is uncontrollably moody. Think: David Wallace Foster), he is also bipolar. What follows is one of the most breathtaking descriptions of this mental condition that this reader has ever read:

“As Leonard strode along, thoughts stacked up in his head like air traffic over Logan Airport to the northwest. There were one or two jumbo jets full of Big Ideas, a fleet of 707s laden with the cargo of sensual impressions (the color of the sky, the smell of the sea), as well as Learjets carrying rich solitary impulses that wished to travel incognito. All these planes requested permission to land simultaneously. Leonard radioed the aircraft, telling some to keep circling while ordering others to divert to another location entirely. The stream of traffic was never-ending…”

How do you carry on a relationship with someone who is hostage to his emotions and at the mercy of Lithium, which leaves him dulled and somnambulant, plump and often impotent…yet often magnetic? Indeed, there are times the reader will question exactly what the attraction is and why Madeleine succumbs to it. But wait – in the wings is the man who still carries the torch and who is currently overseas working out the big questions: the meaning of life, the existence of God, and the true nature of love.

There are those who will consider the plot to be vaguely misogynistic. After all, Madeleine is the “prize” between two very determined men; she is hardly “I am woman, hear me roar.” Rather, “it turned out that Madeleine had a madwoman in the attic: it was her six-foot-three boyfriend.” Mr. Eugenides is not trying to make politically-correct statements; rather, he is working within the confines of the traditional marriage plot, with wisps and tendrils of everything from Jane Eyre to Anna Karenina. And he does so smartly. He deconstructs not only the deconstruction of the marriage plot, but answers the question about why we still rejoice in this timeworn style. And he does it with page-turning fervor to show how reading about love affects the ways we fall in love.

With devastating wit and a nod to intellectual and academic influences, Jeffrey Eugenides creates a fresh new way to approach the predictable marriage plot, revealing its relevance in today’s world. It is an achievement.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 392 readers
PUBLISHER:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux (October 11, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Jeffrey Eugenides
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Middlesex

Bibliography:

• The Virgin Suicides (1993)
• Middlesex (2002) 
• The Marriage Plot (2011)

Movies from books:

• The Virgin Suicides (2000)

“He wondered if religion was partly the love for an imaginary parent and whether any steps to make contact with this parent were justifiable.”

Book Review:

Review by Doug Bruns  (OCT 30, 2011)

Once, many years ago when I was living in Northern Michigan, Jim Harrison walked into the restaurant where I was dining. He didn’t so much walk in, in retrospect, as lumber in. It was the Blue Bird Cafe and I confess that I’d been hanging out there in the hopes of catching a glimpse of him. I was young, trying to turn myself into a writer, and seeking out an idol. Even back then, over thirty years ago, he had lassoed my imagination. Like, many other Harrison readers, it started with Legends of the Fall (1979), then continued with Dalva (1988), and later, The Road Home (1998), a book that changed my life. Much later, I devoured his memoir, Off to the Side (2002), then started filling in the gaps. I studied his poetry, for Harrison thinks of himself first as a poet–and of course there was the column, The Raw and the Cooked in Esquire and Men’s Journal. I used to read the column at the grocery store, between the frozen foods and the bread rack, returning the magazine when I was finished. (Harrison was a foodie before it became sexy, though his style in no way suggests an affinity to the current legions of balsamic vinegar-sniffing poseur journalists.) The man has no gap in his repertoire.

That by way of introduction and confession: there will be no objectivity to this review.

I wish I’d mustered the courage to introduce myself and tell him how much I appreciate his work, but that’s not my style and I image it’s not his either. How do you approach someone who has peered so throughly into your being? A man the critics cite as the progeny of Faulkner and Hemingway? A real died-in-the-wool man of letters? A quiet and respectful distance is the way to go, at least that’s what we do in the Midwest from which we both harken. Anyway, he was seated at the bar. Bothering a man at a bar is bad form.

It has been said that Harrison is that rare writer who can successfully blend the life of the mind with the life of action. It is a formula, though I am hesitate to use that word, that most often appeals to the male reader. That said, the voice he created for Dalva, a woman, in the book of the same name, astounded critics for being so spot-on a female voice–and this from a manly man.

The Great Leader falls soundly into the Harrison oeuvre. It is the story of a hard-drinking, female-ogling fiercely-independent male, Simon Sunderson. (Harrison’s men ogle without the uncomfortable squeamishness of, say, those created by Roth or the hormonal blindness of Updike.)  Sunderson, a recently retired detective, lives deep in Harrison territory, Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. “It was good to live in a place largely ignored by the rest of the world,” reflects Sunderson. Though now officially off the job, Sunderson can’t seem to call it quits and the novel finds him in pursuit of a religious cult leader with an affinity for young girls. Like so many of Harrison’s characters, Sunderson is not so much a reflection of biography as an amalgam ideas. Attempting to explain his current pursuit: “My hobby has always been history,” Sunderson says. “I became interested in the relationship between religion, money and sex.”

Sunderson, not without his personal challenges, is trying hard to be a better man. He misses his wife Diane who left him three years earlier, though they remain in close contact. (“With Diane he always felt a little vulgar and brutish…”) He is a father figure to a neighbor, a sixteen-year-old hottie who seems hell-bent on seducing him. (“The frankness of young women these days always caught him off guard and made him feel like a middle-aged antique, or like a diminutive football player without a face guard on his helmet.”) He drinks too much and is trying to cut back. He spends a lot of time by himself in the woods, thinking, walking around and resolving to make retirement work. His progress is slow on all fronts. He is wracked with ideas, but execution is haphazard.

There is a character in the novel, a friend of Sunderson, who ruefully observes “that a central fact of our time was the triumph of process over content.” That notion is at the core of the Harrison attraction. His prose, like his characters, is direct and intelligent, without many grace notes and devoid of filigree. There is, in other words, a zen-like transparency to the Harrison process. That process, the act of conveying content, is trumped every time by content. Pulling that off consistently, as Harrison continues to do, is a talent that is reserved for the best of the best. This novel is an example of how rare such a voice has become.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 4 readers
PUBLISHER:	Grove Press (October 4, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Doug Bruns
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Jim Harrison
EXTRAS:	Interview and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Disaster Was My God by Bruce Duffy

Bibliography:

• Wolf: A False Memoir (1971)
• A Good Day to Die (1973)
• Farmer (1976)
• Legends of the Fall: Three Novellas (1979)
• Warlock (1981)
• Sundog: The Story of an American Foreman, Robert Corvus Strang (1984)
• Dalva (1988)
• The Woman Lit By Fireflies: Three Novellas (1990)
• Julip: Three Novellas (1994)
• The Road Home (1988)
• The Beast God Forgot to Invent: Three Novellas (2000)
• True North (2004)
• The Summer He Didn’t Die: Three Novellas (2005)
• Returning To Earth (2007)
• The English Major (2008)
• The Farmer’s Daughter (2009)
• The Great Leader (October 2011)

Children’s books:

• The Boy Who Ran to the Woods (Illustrated by Tom Pohrt) (2000)

Nonfiction:

• Just Before Dark: Collected Nonfiction (1991)
• The Raw and the Cooked: Adventures of a Roving Gourmand (2001)
• Off to the Side: A Memoir (2002)

“Sometimes we find our true and inherent selves during youth. It is a recognition of something that at first is small within us, that we will grow into somehow. My shipboard nickname was MYNAH.  Almost my name but with a step into the air and a glimpse of some extra thing, like a slight swivel in their walk all birds have when they travel by land.”

Book Review:

Review by Friederike Knabe  (OCT 5, 2011)

In his new novel, The Cat’s Table, Michael Ondaatje imagines a young boy’s three-week sea voyage across the oceans, from his home in Colombo, Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) to England. The eleven-year-old travels alone and is, not surprisingly, allocated to the “lowly” Cat’s Table, where he joins an odd assortment of adults and two other boys of similar age.

In the voice of young “Michael,” Ondaatje shares the boys’ adventures on the ship with charming immediacy, while an older, adult “Michael” looks over his shoulder, first hardly noticeable, and later, more and more directly reflecting on his own recollections and moving the story forward. Are we reading a childhood memoir of sorts, a coming-of-age story, a personal journey into the past? Are we reading fact or fiction? Maybe, all of it. The parallels to the author’s life are easily spotted: a childhood in Ceylon, a nineteen fifties journey by ship from there to England… Other parallels to the author’s life come into view in the course of the book. Also, Ondaatje suggests in the first pages: “I try to imagine who the boy on the ship was…” In the Author’s Note (at the end of the book) Ondaatje is as clear and opaque as can be: “Although the novel uses the colouring and locations of memoir and autobiography, The Cat’s Table is fictional – from the Captain and crew and all its passengers on the boat – to the narrator.” Still…

Young Michael and his two new friends, Cassius and Ramadhin, become soon inseparable; yet, their friendship does not extend to sharing much about their backgrounds, so we don’t know more about them either at this point. They freely roam the huge ship, exploring any nook and cranny they can get into, especially during nights. Cassius is the rambunctious, Ramadhin, the cautious, more reasonable one, conscious of his “weak heart.” Michael describes himself as a “follower.”

The men at the Cat’s Table, astutely observed by young Michael, while distinct in personality and behaviour, share, nonetheless, their curiosity for the happenings on the ship – one could call theirs “the gossip table” – and, more importantly, they each provide some kind of “life lesson” for the boys, be it in history, music, literature or biology. The most intriguing passenger at the table, however, is Miss Lasqueti, who appears to have insider knowledge of a very different kind. From time to time, they are joined by seventeen-year-old, beautiful and “mysterious” Emily, a distant cousin of Michael’s. Given her “higher social standing” and her placement in the dining room, she can contribute intriguing news for any evolving “story.” She knows, for example, much about the dangerous, heavily guarded, prisoner, who the boys have noticed during their nighttime adventures. Of course, Emily also has her secret encounters at night, overheard by Michael hiding in a lifeboat…

For the first half or so of the novel, I am simply charmed by the descriptions of the boys’ hilarious or risky escapades on the ship as it moves across the Indian Ocean towards the Suez Canal. We explore the ship’s “world” through a child’s eyes. The episodes, told more like independent vignettes than in a contiguous narrative, succeed, nonetheless, in carrying our curiosity forward: they capture the atmosphere on ship, provide personality capsules of passengers or crew, and details of their various activities. Once closer to land, we are offered glimpses into the varying landscapes and port cities. While Michael’s journey is depicted with gentleness and often lyrical descriptions, something seems to be missing in terms of the story’s overall meaning and depth – at least for me. But soon enough, like entering a new section in the book, the voice of the adult Michael takes on a more prominent role. He drops hints how different episodes or people might be connected; he starts asking questions about the veracity of what we have been told, pondering the reliability of his long-term memory…

And, most engagingly, Ondaatje, while continuing to remain within the overall three-week time span of the journey, now leaves it with ease to reveal aspects of past and future of several of the central characters. These mental excursions – relating to Emily, Miss Lasqueti, Ramadhin, etc. and, last but not least, the prisoner – help us fill in gaps within earlier descriptions of episodes during the voyage. They also add an integrating layer to the narrative that I had been hoping for. Finally, they bring us also closer to the adult Michael. It is only later in life that he realizes the journey’s importance as “a rite of passage;” a journey that formed him in more ways than he has acknowledged for a long time. In hindsight he can give voice to an emotion that he experienced then and many times since as he grew into an adult as “a desire that is a mixture of thrill and vertigo.” Emily, when he meets her again, much later, has the better phrase for what affected them: “We all became adults before we were adults.”

In the end, it does not matter anymore – at least to me – whether this book is a novel or a memoir/autobiography. It is a beautifully rendered story of growing up and living with the memories of youth. The novel’s language, the tone, the images and the tender approach to his subject suggest that this is probably Ondaatje’s most personal and intimate novel in many years.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 46 readers
PUBLISHER:	Knopf (October 4, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Friederike Knabe
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Michael Ondaatje
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh Star of the Sea by Joseph O’Connor

Bibliography:

• Coming Through the Slaughter (1976)
• In the Skin of a Lion (1987)
• The English Patient (1992)
• Anil’s Ghost (2000)
• Divisadero (2007)
• The Cat’s Table (October 2011)

Nonfiction:

• Running in the Family (1982)
• The Conversation with Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film (2002)

Poetry:

• The Cinnamon Peeler (1991)
• Handwriting (1999)

Movies from books:

• The English Patient (1996)

“The sun struck his body at an angle that reduced him to a thin black shadow lined in molton gold and yet when he looked back at me I could make out his smile. It was electric. He motioned for me to follow, but I refused, preferring to sit on a nearby rock, the tide splashing against me as he rushed into the surf. Watching him disappear and reappear in the water, I squinted against the twinkling light that reflected off the water until my sight was infrared. ”

Book Review:

Review by Friederike Knabe  (OCT 3, 2011)

In her debut novel, Everything Was Good-Bye, Gurjinder Basran tells the story of one happy-unhappy family, seen through the eyes of Meena, the youngest of six sisters. Set against the backdrop of suburban British Columbia, Basran paints a richly coloured portrait of a close-knit Punjabi community, caught between the traditions of “home” in India and their Canadian home, where their community is surrounded by a predominantly white, rather laid-back English-speaking society. With an impressively confident approach to a complex subject matter and a lively and engaging writing style, the young Indian-Canadian author explores the emotional turmoil, faced by a girl/young woman like Meena, experiencing the two cultures intimately. Traditional family values are assessed against the young heroine’s need for independence and emotional fulfillment.

From a young age Meena is an astute observer of her surroundings, expressing her thoughts and feelings more easily to her private notebooks than to any one person. Her subdued, hard-working mother, a widow since Meena’s early childhood, appears to be in a state of permanent mourning. The traditional customs and rituals that sustain her physically and mentally, also provide her justification for her strict treatment of her daughters. Speaking little English herself, she insists on Punjabi spoken; she demands of her daughters the traditional obedient behaviour that makes them acceptable as future wives and her constant concern is to find “good” husbands for her daughters, meaning that they are somebody with a good income and, very important, a professional designation, such as a lawyer or a doctor. Love? That may come later, or not.

By the time we share Meena’s intimate musings on her life, all sisters, except one, have or are about to be married according to the traditions. Harj, her favourite sister, was expelled from the family after being falsely accused of misbehaving by one of the many “aunties.”

The aunties, a kind of informal morality police, assume the responsibility of monitoring the young people’s behaviour in public, reporting without delay, when they observe, for example, when a girl alone is talking to a boy. Meena and Harj used to make fun of these aunties, whether related or not, referring to them as the IIA – the Indian Intelligence Agency. With a few evocative sentences, Basran expressively captures the characteristics of different aunties and others in the community: some speak deliberate “Bombay British” (showing off), others are FOBS (Fresh Off the Boat) or DIPs (Dumb Indian Punjabs)… Her sense of humour and irony is conspicuous, revealing an attractive mix of intimate knowledge of and critical distance to such reality. For example, one so-called auntie, claims to visit India every year, “to look for the latest fashion”…”Our styles here,” she explains, “are a year behind.” Nonetheless, while India in her mind is “very progressive,” she prefers to “keep the customs and traditions of Hindustan, of our India” here in Canada. This somewhat twisted logic that may well contribute to undermining any adaptation of Punjabi customs to those of their chosen home country, creates fundamental problems for Meena.

While the young people are not allowed to voice an opinion at extended family gatherings, they realize that they are left with few options as regards balancing the old and the new. Some rebel and are expelled from the comfort and security of the community, others pay half-heartedly lip service and play the “obediency game” at a superficial level, yet, others submit and suffer quietly… Meena, watching her mother’s seemingly unending grief, but also her sisters’ marriages, is increasingly questioning the meaning of love, marriage and family:

“I hated the ritual of belated mourning. We existed between past dreams and present realities, never able to do anything but wait. For what, I didn’t know…”

In her other reality, that of school, university and later in professional life, Meena encounters much ignorance and insensitivity vis-à-vis her and her background. Being reticent herself, she cannot easily explain her life and is usually treated as an outsider. As can be expected, she finds it easier to open up, emotionally and intellectually, to young people, who, for whatever reasons, also feel like outcasts in their respective communities. Liam, one of her classmates, is one person, who can “pull her out of herself.”  Wandering the countryside and beaches around Vancouver, their developing friendship is touching in its innocence, fragility and complexity. Having to resort to secrets and lies at home, she feels pushed into a dual existence. And there is Kal, her gentle childhood friend…

Whether, over time, she can detach herself from the strictures of her traditional upbringing and how she will handle any future decisions for her life, moves the narrative forward in very affecting and, at times, surprising ways. As we accompany Meena’s exploration of a rainbow of emotions – from love, physical intimacy and happiness to loss and pain. Basran’s expressive language takes on additional lyrical qualities when she expresses her heroine’s deep feelings. In the end, what are family values? Can they adapt?

Not wanting to give any spoilers, suffice to say that I was captivated by Meenas’ voice in conveying her reality, her life between two worlds, the growth beyond victimhood. One could quibble over small details, such as lacking clarification of some Punjabi terms and, possibly, the brevity with an element of stereotyping when describing the non-Punjabi environment. Yet, these are not serious flaws. Basran, is without doubt a new author to watch. With Everything Was Good-Bye, Gurjinder Basran was a semi-finalist in Amazon’s 2008 Breakthrough Novel Award and the winner of the 2010 Search for the Great BC Novel.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 23 readers
PUBLISHER:	Mother Tongue Publishing (October 2, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Friederike Knabe
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Gurjinder Basran
EXTRAS:	Interview on YouTube
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Namesake by Jumpa Lahiri

Bibliography:

• Everything Was Goodbye (October 2010)

“Just go sit in a café and read the play,” he told us. “Have a coffee. Take a pen.”

He said these things as if they were obvious, as if they were what any normal person would do.

But they weren’t obvious things to most of us. Even if I explored Paris on my own, even if I sat by myself from time to time on the banks of the river, when he suggested them they were different, as if we’d be crazy not to listen. And so those many of us who loved him, we did what he asked. And we felt important, we felt wild, we felt like poets and artists, we felt like adults living in the world with books in our hands, with pens, with passions. And when we returned to school, how many of us prayed he’d ask what we’d done over the weekend? Not only if we’d read but where.

And that’s something.

Book Review:

Review by Devon Shepherd  (SEP 26, 2011)

Part school story, part existentialism primer, You Deserve Nothing, is a deftly told and absorbing debut. Ostensibly, the story of a troubled teacher who goes too far, You Deserve Nothing is also a thoughtful examination of moral education, of the ways in which we learn to navigate the minefield between duty and freedom, courage and cowardice, the self and the persona. The story, predominately concerned with a scandal that is as shocking as it is mundane, is told from three perspectives some five or so years later: Will Silver’s, a young and charismatic English teacher; Marie de Cléry’s, the beautiful, but insecure daughter of a cruelly elegant mother and a workaholic father; Gilad Fischer’s, an intelligent but lonely boy, the son of an American diplomat and Israeli mother, who idolizes Will.

International School of France is an expensive private school in Paris, and while the majority of students at ISF are “kids who’d been plucked from an Air Force base in Virginia and deposited in Paris, who resented the move, refused to adapt,” the informal style of Will Silver’s Senior Seminar resonates with the privileged offspring of upper-echelon executives and foreign diplomats, kids “who were fluent in several languages and cultures, who were so relaxed, so natural in exquisite apartments at elaborate parties, who moved from country to country, from adult to adolescent with a professional ease.” A dynamic and charismatic teacher, Will pushes his students to think through ideas of duty and freedom, courage and responsibility as they appear in the Bible and the works of Sartre, Camus, Shakespeare, and Faulkner. Although a true believer in the power and importance of literature, Will can’t help but wonder if much of the pleasure of teaching “lies exclusively in the performing, in being adored.” Will enjoys celebrity among the student body, and undoubtedly, his exhortation to pursue your dreams “in spite of fear . . . No matter what. Because you have to. Because you know it’s right. Because you believe in it. Because by not doing it you’re betraying yourself” will remind many of Robin Williams’ character (carpe diem, seize the day boys, make your lives extraordinary) in Dead Poet’s Society, and as I read the classroom scenes, I half-expected everyone to jump up on chairs and quote Walt Whitman (O Captain! My Captain).

An obvious association, I know, but I couldn’t help but feel at times that that’s the point, that Will is aping that role – the role of risk-taking, life-changing teacher. This is a book about courage and responsibility, about the ways in which we shirk our freedom and opt out of creating ourselves; moving half-way across the world for a job you love might seem like a brave choice, but for Will it’s an act of cowardice, an abrupt flight from a wife he loves when the pain of his parents’ deaths becomes too much.

Numbing himself with a sort of Sartrean bad faith, Will’s dazzling persona protects him from having to emotionally engage with the world. Even when he flouts conventional morality and starts a sexual relationship with Marie, both a minor and a student at ISF, it is less a principled embrace of desire than a retreat from his despair, having witnessed a murder, and his shame at having done nothing to apprehend the murderer. Even the young and inexperienced Marie starts “to have the impression that [she] was making love to a ghost or something.” However, there are no easy villains here, and Alexander Maksik wisely avoids moralizing their relationship. Although Marie, masking her inexperience and insecurity, plays at being the seductress, Maksik allows her a honest sexuality, and Will, unable to doff his role as the instructor, gently teaches her how to enjoy her sexual nature. This is not to excuse Will, of course. Mickey Gold, ISF’s bumbling biology teacher, hits it on the head when he advises Will that trading in the complicated (and reciprocated) love of a real woman for the empty pleasure of “those adoring eyes” is “a coward’s game.”

Just as Marie’s disappointment with Will is inevitable, Gilad’s hero-worship can only mature through disillusionment. Gilad, in the way of the young, conflates the thrilling ideas being taught with the character of his teacher and when, after a heartbreaking scene with his parents, he sits in a café, reading Camus, it pleases him to think that Will would approve of him “there alone, so early in the morning, paying such attention to simple, beautiful things” and when Gilad admits that his infatuation was so complete he “wanted to go to war for him,”,I was reminded of one of the best instances of hero-worship and disillusionment in literature: Nicholas Rostov’s infatuation with Tsar Alexander in War and Peace (in case there’s any doubt: I mean this as a compliment). In fact, it’s partly  Maksik’s astute understanding of adolescent psychology and mannerism that makes this book so good and his characters so real, as captured here in this bantering dialogue between Will and a former student, Mazin:

“ . . . I miss our talks.”
“But we’re having one now.”
“Yeah, on my free period. Lame.”
“I’m flattered you’d waste your free period with me, Maz.”
“Yeah, well don’t get too excited. Anyway Silver, school’s a waste of my time.”
“Carrot?”
“No man, I don’t want a carrot, I want to know why I shouldn’t just move to LA and start a band.”
“Who says you shouldn’t?”
“Please. Everyone.”
“You realize, right, that this is a tired conversation? You know everything I’m going to tell you. It’s the height of boring.”
“No, I don’t. You’re the height of boring. What are you going to tell me?”

However difficult Marie and Gilad’s loss of innocence is, narrated from a place of relative wisdom many years later, that past pain is softened. In comparison, Will is frustratingly opaque, and I couldn’t help but wonder about the place he was narrating from: had he found the courage to dismantle his armor or was he “teaching the needy in some unspecified African nation” or “living cheap in Thailand,” still a ghost?

You Deserve Nothing is an auspicious debut, both for Alexander Maksik who shows himself here to be an unfairly talented writer and for the new Europa Editions’ imprint, edited by Alice Sebold (of The Lovely Bones fame), Tonga Books. I look forward to seeing more from both.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 73 readers
PUBLISHER:	Europa Editions; 1 edition (August 30, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Devon Shepherd
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Alexander Maksik
EXTRAS:	Excerpt and Interview with the author
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Last Brother by Nathacha Appanah

Bibliography:

• You Deserve Nothing (August 2011)
• A Marker to Measure Drift (July 2013)

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

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  (SEP 18, 2011)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bibliography:

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

“I am imprinting this upon my memory,” she said. “The southern exposure of a winter morning light, the sounds of thaw, water dripping off the eaves, the squirrels…Sometimes I seem to know, in the split of a second of a moment, that it will be a moment I’ll want to keep.”

Book Review:

Review by Vesna McMaster  (SEP 12, 2011)

This is a beautiful book. If you want to read something that has the same effect as gazing at a vast and perfect ink-wash painting, calming and yet utterly absorbing, reach for this. Like the tiniest haze of seeping ink will be skillful enough to convey a distant village nestling in the hills, or the flight of a crane; there is not a word misplaced in this small and lovely work. Its theme is poetry, and indeed the exquisite style does full justice to the subject.

The plot follows the lives of a handful of graduate poetry students and their teacher. The initial focus is on their interactions and early relationships during university years, but as the story progresses the camera lens zooms with painful precision on subsequent pinpoints of time.

The technique of the writing is such that it leaves one with an impression of overlapping layers rather than a well-woven tapestry, the latter of which is the more usual impression in a well-plotted novel. Life depicted here is more a palimpsest than a continuous narrative. There’s an almost fatalistic crystallisation of the view of the past seeping into the present (or the ongoing) that’s highly peculiar, and entirely seductive.

It’s even more astonishing to find such alluring excellence in a book that is essentially about writing. Generally, tomes ranting away about the torment of literary endeavours and the social inadequacies of their perpetrators are best put out of their misery immediately by means of a swift bonfire. But rather than wallow first-hand in the self-absorption and uncertainty as so many of these efforts tend to, Chang depicts a view onto these same themes that’s as unnervingly detached as a high-resolution spy satellite picture: taken from space, but accurate enough to read the print on a newspaper. The style is formal, bordering on the stilted, the tone even and quiet.

Two of the central characters are the poetry student friends Roman and Bernard. Roman is driven, moderately gifted, insistently handsome and, eventually, inordinately successful. Bernard is his counterpart, with caricature-like introversion, religious torment and more than a hint of obsessive compulsive disorder born out in poverty, and the novel makes no bones about his role in the narrative as the “traditional” poet.

These extreme stereotypes should be flat shadows by rights. Instead they’re almost luminous, depicted by refraction, like a painter using the space that is not to denote the presence of an object. These two characters vie with each other, in their peculiar way, for the attentions of their teacher Miranda Sturgis, the acclaimed and established poet. Their differing approaches, viewpoints and degree of success in gaining her approval and attention are at the core of the novel.

Along with the much-debated question of “why write poetry,” the novel explores facets of the role of the teacher (or mentor), the relationship of the mentor with the recipient, and the progression of the student in turn becoming mentor. The development here is linked structurally and thematically to the ageing process, which gives the novel as a whole a feeling of natural evolution; something organic and inevitable. Perhaps this is why I can’t remember reading anything with so little a sense of contrivance. Despite, or perhaps because of, the meticulous precision with which it’s put together.

The character reveal is also atypical. It’s not so much a reader discovering an already-formed entity but the entity and the reader making the discovery together. Again, the sense of extreme detachment fused with extreme intimacy is slightly dizzying.

If you read action thrillers exclusively, then I suppose this book is not for you. Apart from that I’d recommend it to anybody. You don’t need to know about writing or poetry, just be ready to think about why art is necessary for life. And read a jolly good story in the meantime, complete with romance, betrayal, suspense and verve. It’s quiet, but it’s a page-turner.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 15 readers
PUBLISHER:	W. W. Norton & Company; Reprint edition (September 12, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Devon Shepherd
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Lan Samantha Change
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another book on poetry: The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker

Bibliography:

• Hunger: A Novella (1998)
• Inheritance (2004)
• All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost (September 2010)

“His hand is growing cold; still she holds it. Sitting at his bedside she does not cry. From time to time, she lays her cheek against his, taking slight comfort in the rough bristle of unshaved hair, and she speaks to him a little.

I love you, she tells him.

I always will.

Je t’aime, she says.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (SEP 8, 2011)

Lily Tuck`s novel, I Married You for Happiness, is the story of a woman mourning the sudden death of her husband. It was shortly before dinner when Philip came home from his college teaching position. When Nina calls him for dinner he is dead. She lies by his cold body all night remembering their lives together. The prose is spare and lovely, recalling their joys, passions and pains of their forty-two years together.

Recently, I’ve read three memoirs about grieving a spouse after sudden death: Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, Joyce Carol Oates’ A Widow’s Story, and Francisco Goldman’s Say Her Name. Lily Tuck’s book covers similar territory as these memoirs but in fictional form.

Nina is an artist and Philip is a mathematician specializing in probability theory. They have one daughter, thirty-five year old Louise. This book takes place over the course of one night following Philip’s death. As the story unfolds, Louise does not yet know her father has died. Nina just wants to spend this one night next to Philip. “In the morning she will make telephone calls, she will write e-mails, make arrangements; the death certificate, the funeral home, the church service – whatever needs to be done. Tonight – tonight, she wants nothing. She wants to be alone. Alone with Philip.”

Nina tries to remember their lives together, the big things and the little things. She is especially focused on thoughts about a woman that Philip had known before meeting her. Iris and Philip were in a car crash and Iris died. Had Iris lived, Nina wonders, would Philip have married her instead of Nina? She puts together different theories of probability in her mind for different scenarios and tries to think like her husband would in these situations. “What if she finds a photo of Iris? The photo slips out from in between papers, from inside a folder in a desk drawer.”

Simple things cause her great anxiety. What were the exact last words she said to Philip? What did they do yesterday, last weekend? She is not sure and this bothers her. She wants to know and hold the past close to her, remembering all that she can.

She and Philip were so different. Nina paints mostly landscapes and portraits, usually with water colors. Philip gives lectures on probability. She remembers lots of mathematical problems and information that Philip has shared with her even though many are beyond her capacity to understand. “Most mathematical functions, Philip tells her, are classified as two-way functions because they are easy to do and easy to undo – like addition and subtraction, for example. The way turning a light on and turning it off is a two-way function. A one-way function is more complicated because although it may be easy to do, you cannot undo it. Like mixing paint, you can’t unmix it, or like breaking an egg shell, you can’t put the egg back together.” Nina thinks about the physics of alternate universes and wonders if Philip can be alive and dead. Is he really dead?

Nina also gives a lot of thought to the existence of an afterlife and what the great philosophers had to say about it, especially Pascal. Pascal believed it was a better probability to believe in God than not because if God existed and one behaved righteously, they could have eternal life. Still, Nina is not convinced. Ironically, Philip the mathematician had more of a belief in afterlife than does Nina. Philip believes in a libertarian God, “a God who allows room for free will.”

Nina struggles to remember where they’ve lived, what countries they’ve visited, how many houses they resided in, how many animals they’ve owned. These little things help her feel closer to Philip as she spends the night next to him holding his hand and stroking his face. This is her night to be with him, her last night to shower herself in their love.

Philip’s favorite color was red. He once brought her a red embroidered coat from Hong Kong. She rarely ever wore it. However, tonight she puts it on over an old coat she is wearing and parades around the room in it, wondering if Philip would have found this silly.

During their marriage, Nina had an affair and once was raped. She kept both of these occurences secret from Philip. She worries about Philip’s faithfulness to her. “Sometimes when Philip comes back from being away, she sniffs through his laundry, searching for the scent of an unfamiliar perfume – patchouli, jasmine, tuberoses. What is her name? The name of a city. Sofia.”

The prose is spare and the book is written in short vignettes, each about some aspect of their life together or their belief system. As the night progresses, Nina drinks wine, dozes occasionally, but mostly stays up and remembers and imagines their time together. Theirs was a great love and one that has withstood the test of time. Lily Tuck understands what it is like to be with one person for forty-two years. She understands great love and passion.

Interestingly, Ms. Tuck has borrowed information from some of the greatest mathematicians, logicians, physicists, and philosophers for this book: Pascal, Einstein, Wilczek, Erdos, Hofstadter, Hawking, and Feynman to name a few. Though the parts about physics and math were sometimes difficult for me to get my head around, they served nicely to illustrate the yin and yang of this marriage. This is a short and lovely book, an homage to a great love, now lost in real time, but forever present in Nina’s heart and mind.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 43 readers
PUBLISHER:	Atlantic Monthly Press; 1 edition (September 6, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Lily Tuck
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Say Her Name by Francisco Goldman A Widow’s Story by Joyce Carol Oates The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion Also by Lily Tuck: The News from Paraguay

Bibliography:

• Interviewing Matisse, or the Woman Who Died Standing Up (1991)
• The Woman Who Walked on Water (1996)
• Siam Or the Woman Who Shot a Man (1999)
• Limbo, and Other Places I Have Lived (2002)
• The News From Paraguay (2004) 
• I Married You for Happiness (September 2011)
• The House at Belle Fontaine: Stories (April 2013)

Nonfiction:

• Woman of Rome: A Life of Elsa Morante (2008)