“What happens to days that disappear? The light fades, the gates begin to close, and all that a day once held— a glance, a fight, a taste of bread, a handful of braided hair, thousands of worries and triumphs and regrets— all of it slips between those closing gates, vanishing into a dark and silent room. When Josephine Ashkenazi first invented Genizah, all she wanted to to do was open those gates.

At least, that was how it started.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate (FEB 18, 2014)

The idea for writing a modern version of the biblical story of Joseph came apparently from the author’s husband. It is a brilliant one, even more brilliantly executed. First, because she uses it for resonance rather than prediction; you recognize the biblical parallels after they have occurred, but you never know when she is going to depart from the Genesis version, so her novel remains surprising to the end. Second, because the Egyptian setting grounds the book in aspects of Jewish history that are perhaps less well-known, but obviously relevant to the eternal geopolitical situation in the Middle East. And third, because the Torah reference provides the perfect opening to explore many issues in Jewish teaching and philosophy, most notably those concerning divine providence, accident, and free will. The title of her novel, actually, is borrowed from a treatise on these very questions written in Cairo by the twelfth century doctor and philosopher Maimonides. The result, in Horn’s hands, is a richly layered novel that is humane, exciting, informative, and thought-provoking, all at the same time.

Josephine (Josie) Ashkenazi is a software developer and CEO of a company called Genizah, which enables its customers to record, index, cross-reference, and recall even the most trivial aspects of their lives, linking them to everything around them in both historical and geographical dimensions. She is asked to go to Egypt as consultant on a vast new library in Alexandria, and accepts the challenge, leaving behind her Israeli-born husband Itamar, her six-year-old daughter Tali, and her elder sister Judith, who has a subsidiary position with the firm. I must admit that there was something a little science-fictiony about the premise (or magical realist, if you will); although the ideas are all conceivable, it requires some suspension of disbelief to accept the degree to which they had been developed. But two things happen to anchor the book almost immediately. The first is that the action suddenly shifts back to 1896 in Cambridge, England, where two formidable Scottish sisters confront the University Reader in Rabbinics, Solomon Schechter, with a fragment of manuscript they have recently brought back from Cairo. Despite the slightly comic tone of this episode, it is also feels entirely true, and indeed one discovers that Schechter was a real person. And when Josie goes to Egypt, she falls victim to a more contemporary reality: she is kidnapped and held for ransom. The suspension of disbelief quality never goes away completely from Josie’s story, but from now on her role as CEO fades behind those as absent wife, missing mother, and beaten woman.

Genizah, the name of Josie’s firm, is the Hebrew word for the store-room in a synagogue where Torah scrolls and similar documents were placed after they had become unusable, for the name of God could not be erased. The real Schechter unearthed in the Genizah of a Cairo synagogue a chaotic hoard of documents, secular as well as sacred, a discovery which made his name. Among them were letters from Maimonides and a draft of his Guide for the Perplexed. This opens the door to scenes in Cairo of the 12th century, to interweave with those in the 19th and 21st. It also introduces some of the philosophical themes of the book.

Horn is a Jewish writer (and winner of two National Jewish Book Awards), not just because she writes about Jewish characters and subjects, but because she shares the Jewish fascination with philosophical debate. There is a chapter, for instance, in which Maimonides outlines five theories of divine providence, ranging from total predestination to utter chance, and another in which he classifies three different kinds of evil. Other readers might consider these dry diversions, but they fascinated me both as ideas and for how they linked to the moral implications of the story of Josie and her family at home. They formed a serious core to the novel that amply balanced its more fantastic aspects. And indeed balance is all; the more I look, the more I see parallels and linkages that bind this complex novel together. Perhaps some of its characters could be developed a little further, but as a theme-based novel it could hardly be bettered.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 68 readers
PUBLISHER:	W. W. Norton & Company (September 9, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Dara Horn
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt Wikipedia page on the biblical Joseph
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson

Bibliography:

• In the Image (2002)
• The World to Come (2006)
• All Other Nights (2009)
• A Guide for the Perplexed (October 2013)

Nonfiction:

• The Rescuer (DATE)

“They talked about it afterward, at the end of summer, after the summer folks had left and there was room to breathe again on the island. They talked slowly, hesitantly, in that drawn-out way you hear less and less down east, with long pauses between short utterances, as if, in the end, most things were best left unsaid.

Down at the boatyard where young Floyd was attending to some hitch in the electrics, resuscitating a bilge pump, adjusting a prop shaft that was shaking the engine something awful; down at the town dock where they tied up at the end of a long day, after hosing down their boats, shedding foul-weather jackets, high boots, oilskin overalls, rubber gloves, like lobsters shedding their skins; down at Elliot’s Paralyzo too—the only watering hole on the island—they sipped the froth off their beers and talked of Jim.“

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (JAN 31, 2014)

For any reader who revels in confident, lyrical prose – rich in detail with meticulously chosen words – Alice Greenway’s book will enchant.

The storyline focuses on the elderly and irascible ornithologist Jim Kennoway, who, at the end of his career, retreats to a Maine island after his leg is amputated. There, tortured by past memories and fortified by alcohol and solitude, he eschews the company of others. Yet early on, he receives an unwanted visitor: Cadillac, the daughter of Tosca, who teamed with him as a scout to spy on the Japanese army in the Solomon Islands.

In one sense, the theme is how we evolve and own our memories. In the past, Jim examined how the tongues of different bird species evolved to adapt to different flowers of particular islands. Now he finds himself evolving to circumstances beyond his control: the lack of mobility, the inevitable encroachment of memories and of significant others.

As the book travels back and forth in time – to his youth in the early 1900s, to his stint in Naval Intelligence in the Solomon Islands, to his respected career collecting for the Museum of Natural History, the one constant in his life has always been birding. “Birding, he realizes, offered him both a way to engage with the world and a means to escape it.” Indeed, skinning birds reduces them to their very essence.

So it’s no surprise that even as the book opens, Jim has taken upon himself a quixotic task: to evaluate whether Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island was really one of the Solomon Islands. And herein lies another theme: the dastardly pirate Long John Silver, in Treasure Island, remarks how alike he is with the novel’s young hero, Jim Hawkins. Good and evil can exist simultaneously in nature and in life…or can it? Can both co-exist in Jim himself?

The book blurb implies that Tosca’s daughter Cadillac will play an integral role of capturing “his heart and that of everyone she meets.” I believe that sets up false expectations. Cadillac is indeed a catalyst to help Jim arrive at some clarity but for this reader, the center focus of the story is always Jim. It’s an intelligent and beautifully written book.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 9 readers
PUBLISHER:	Atlantic Monthly Press (January 7, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Alice Greenway
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: In Hovering Flight by Joyce Hinnefeld Solomon Time by Will Randall

Bibliography:

• White Ghost Girls (2006)
• The Bird Skinner (January 2014)

“It is the feeling that your life has just left the room.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (SEP 6, 2011)

Nabokov stated in the first page of his 1961 memoir, Speak Memory, “…our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.” In Diana Spiotta’s new novel, Stone Arabia, eccentric narcissist, obsessive archivist and iconoclastic musician Nik Kranis mines that fleeting fissure of light and warns his sister, Denise, “Self-curate or disappear.”

This nostalgic and affecting story of siblings (and family) is a philosophical meditation on memory and the driven desire for autobiography–to document and render a consequential life, and to assemble disparate experiences into coherent narratives. “And even then,” says Denise, “the backward glance is distorted by the lens of the present…It is not just that emotions distort memory. It is that memory distorts memory.”

At the vortex of this novel is fifty-year-old Nik Kranis, aka his alter ego, Nik Worth, a pre-punk, no-hit wonder, LA musician, whose band The Fakes almost made it twenty years ago. “Nik had the sensibility down. And Nik had the look down. He was born to look pasty and skinny and angular.” But a combination of self-sabotage and solipsism undermined commercial success, and he alternately constructed a legendary career in music via his manufactured narrative, “The Chronicles.” Stretching back from 1973-2004, “The Chronicles” is a thirty-volume reinvention of a life, a daily scrapbook and fictionalized biography of Nik Worth, platinum rock star. It is a career arc so detailed and spectacular that it would rival Dylan’s.

Included in “The Chronicles is every band Nik was ever in, every record he ever made, and his solo career, recorded via his twenty-volume “Ontology of Worth.” We also get liner notes, reviews (sometimes highly critical and damning, all created from Nik’s imagination), obits of former band members, and detailed artwork for every cover. Nik is what we would call a legend in his own mind. We depend on Denise’s shifting narrative modes to trace the authentic Nik, a hermetic, aging, chain-smoking, alcoholic mooch who is blasé about his present decay and his future prospects. “He pursued a lifetime of abuse that could only come from a warped relationship with the future.” But even Denise is hooked on Nik’s worth as a musician.

The story is narrated largely through Denise’s point-of-view, which shifts back and forth from first to third person, and is conveyed like the 80’s eclectic music scene, mash-up style, that fans of Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad will appreciate. She’s the slightly younger sister and caretaker of the family, and Nik’s biggest fan. However, Denise is concerned with exact recall, and is writing “The “Counterchronicles” as counterpoint to Nik’s mythical biography, to earnestly document an accurate record of recent events. Besides Nik, her life orbits around her daughter, Ada, a documentary filmmaker who wants Nik as her next subject; a tepid relationship with boyfriend, Jay, who she sees every two weeks for sex and old movies; and a mother who is suffering from early dementia. Denise is frightened of her own memory loss, convinced that it is imminent and inevitable.

Trebly and anxious, Denise panics vicariously through sordid and tragic news events. External though they are, they penetrate her personal boundaries, leak inside and cause ongoing existential crises. SARS, Abu Ghraib, and a celebrity murder-suicide are but a few of the terrors that invade Denise’s psyche. Moreover, Denise and Nik are enmeshed to a degree that “My sister doesn’t count as my audience because she feels like an extension of me. She’s, well, an alternative version of me.”

Spiotta’s creamy prose is abundant with quotable lines and arch aphorisms. There isn’t much of a plot, but the story is powerful and vibrant, laced with mordant, electric riffs and visceral, melancholy chords.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 38 readers
PUBLISHER:	Scribner; First Edition edition (July 12, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Dana Spiotta
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

Bibliography:

• Lightning Field (2001)
• Eat the Document (2006)
• Stone Arabia (2011)

“Silent were the skies. Silent the soldiers, inched under the soil. Silent too the burned bodies, heaped in cinders…Silent the guns. Silent the wasted cavalcade of men, women and children, as they journeyed, blind, toward their homes. Silent too the fires that had burned down the cities. Silent the gas chambers…Silent the seed thrust toward the egg.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  AUG 16, 2011)

Evie Steppman’s mammoth ears are a repository of history, memory, and time. She was born unnamed to British parents in Lagos, Nigeria, during the end of British colonial rule (1946), and, now in her fifties, she is chronicling her story and the stories of various individuals from a collection of documents, letters, diaries, pamphlets, photographs, and assorted, emotionally powerful objects, or “unica” (one-of-a-kind objects).

Evie suffers from severe tinnitus (which resembles Ménière’s disease), and, isolated in an attic in Eastern Scotland, is anxious to record these memories before she is engulfed by the din in her head. Her gifted and telepathic sense of hearing is analogous to Saleem’s prophetic olfactory organ in Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.

“My ears were extraordinary. Crimson, membranous, graced with heavy lobes, they whorled their way into the hollow where ciliary movement stirred, absorbing the sounds…All my talent had gone into the development of my ears.”

Like Rushdie, Williams uses polyphonic diversity of voice and magical realism to tell a story of ordinary people living during extraordinary times. But whereas Saleem is born precisely at the stroke of midnight during the birth of a nation, Evie’s birth is a tragic affair. Clinging to her mother’s womb, she coveted her life inside the amniotic chamber, where her acute sense of hearing began. Evie delayed her own birth by two months, subsequently ending her mother’s life.

“…the vicious spitting of feral cats, rugbeaters thwacking, fat goats being led to market…women pounding manioc. I heard the punishing of boy thieves…My hearing was demotic and unprincipled.”

The sounds that came to Evie through the echo chamber of the womb resembled a phonograph’s–separating sound from its object, storing them until they were ready to be replayed. Her father’s voice, as he read Dickens, Darwin, Oscar Wilde’s fairy tales, Treasure Island, and the Lord’s Prayer, was muted and flat through amniotic fluid, but permanently recorded.

The tick-tock of father’s pocket watch was steady and continuous, as was the sound of the sea outside. Evie learned opposites and contrasts—that East and West repelled each other, that Cat and Sparrow were “coupled in mutual hate.”

Evie’s audition is also temporally transcendent—she hears through time and space, as if her hearing materialized from the primordial steam that saturated her with timeless tutoring of the past and present. As well as binding her to history, her ears have yoked her to ancient myths and fables.

The story is a non-linear journey, but is cohesively braided through the channels of Evie’s aural migrations — through empire, war, genocide, independence, and a glam rock tour through the US, David Bowie-style. We are also introduced to Evie’s remarkable mother; her grandfather, an elderly, delusional man whose fantasies of Frankensteinian prowess would make Mary Shelley raise an eyebrow; and to Evie’s ardent, emotionally charged, and life-altering love affair with an enigmatic actress, Damaris.

A key event underground with the nightsoil workers is a literary triumph of compassion and imagination, a vivid, hallucinatory examination of humanity through those forgotten and marginalized souls.

Williams seamlessly controls the disclosure of multiple events, with the penultimate, harrowing scene singularly expressed through a letter from Evie’s childhood friend, Ade. Ade was a native of Lagos, the scrappy son of Iffe, (a theatrical onion seller who Evie adored), and her constant companion in the Jankara marketplace and city streets, until a wretched misunderstanding divided them. It was also during her sixth year of life, while with Ade, that the genesis of Evie’s name is born.

Lagos is an allegory to Evie’s birth, a place that had grown out of the water. This duality of land and water euphemized Evie’s ability to inhabit more than one “world,” through her towering perspicacity of audition.

The Echo Chamber is both a subtle and outrageous novel that echoes other novels– a pastiche and synthesis of luminaries, such as Isaac Babel, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bruno Schulz, Georges Perec, and others who are interwoven to buttress the story. For example, Evie’s attic life reflects The Street of Crocodiles protagonist, Theodore, listening to the vibrant gusts of air through the rafters, the bellows and inhalation of the wind. There are a staggering number of motifs, metaphors, and allegories, which begs a second reading, just as complex music demands repeated immersion.

The novel’s strength of character is matched by its astonishing assortment of objects that tell their own stories, such as an alleged ancient map, the mappa mundi, and its mythical “monstrous races,” one of the most piquant images of the story. The picture on the map of a pelican is so evocative and shattering in its nuance that it will likely be embedded in the reader’s mind eternally.

This review would not be complete without mentioning that the diary of Evie’s lover, Damaris, is penned by Luke Williams’ friend, Natasha Soobramanien. These two chapters are electrifying and immediately felt, removing a bit of the 19th-century fustiness that sometimes injects the narrative and gracing it with impetuous vigor. Moreover, the gap that the reader feels at times with Evie is closed, the distance removed.

Enter this splendid realm of objects and stories, this auricular theater of sound, the emptiness of silence, the chamber of echoes.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 2 readers
PUBLISHER:	Viking Adult (August 4, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Bookgasm interview with Luke Williams
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Deafening by Frances Itani

Bibliography:

• The Echo Chamber (August 2011)

“Over the last week, if there’s anything I’ve learned, it’s that you’re only who you choose to be. Every moment. The past is gone. Memories are no more solid than dreams. The only real thing, the only true thing, is the present. That’s it.”

“So the things we’ve done don’t count?”

“Of course they do. But we can decide how much. And we can decide what we want the present to be like. We can live it however we want. Own every minute. Be the person we want to be.”

Book Review:

Review by Katherine Petersen  AUG 6, 2011)

A man wakes up, naked, shivering and alone on a desolate beach. He has no idea who he is or why he’s there. He and the reader gradually get clues: he’s Daniel Hayes; he lives in Los Angeles; he’s in northern Maine; and the cops want him, but he doesn’t know why. So begins a new mystery from Marcus Sakey, known for the Blade Itself and The Amateurs. Determined to confirm his identity and find out why he traveled cross-country in a drunk, drug-induced haze, Hayes re-traces he cross-country journey to Los Angeles.

At the same time, in Los Angeles, a woman changes her identity numerous times, stealing a gun and searching in bars for Hayes. Another man, with evil intent it seems—he’s described by one character as a cockroach who crawls in and out of everyone’s dark places–startles Hayes’s lawyer while in the shower, also in search of the elusive Hayes. These three characters will come together at some point, but to say more will give away much of Sakey’s story which twists and turns much like driving the hairpins of a high mountain road.

Sakey’s story is much more than a mystery though. He uses Daniel, and his dissociative fugue, to launch a literary discussion of memory, identity and self. What is memory’s role in self? Do memories make a person? Can you concoct a self from putting together memories?

Rarely in a story are the reader and the main character learning and piecing together information simultaneously. Learning along with Hayes is part of what makes this novel fascinating, along with the mystery of course. Sakey also uses alternating viewpoints to give different perspectives and give us information about other characters. This method works in this novel, but what doesn’t, at least for me, is when Sakey switches from traditional narrative style to a screenplay style. We learn Hayes is a screenwriter, but this change in style stopped the story for me rather than being an ingenious style shift.

Sakey begins the story with short, choppy sentences that mimic the panic that Hayes feels when he initially comes out of the water. In other places, Sakey has a lyrical prose style, making the reader want to read slowly to savor the language as much as the ideas. His vivid descriptions bring places and situations to life, like the first time he looks in the mirror hoping that seeing himself will free his memory.

“No fog parted. No veil lifted. The man in the mirror offered no answers.

He looked exhausted, bruised and worn and dark-circled, but more or less familiar.  For a vertiginous moment, Daniel lost track of which was him and which was the reflection, like one was a doppleganger that could break free and act independently, as he seemed to have snapped from his life.”

Sakey excels at character development, but he also succeeds with dialogue and showing rather than telling about the relationships between his characters. They’re all so intertwined to give an example would ruin parts of the story. While I can’t tell you why the title of the book is appropriate, trust me that it is. For those who appreciate a literary mystery topped with much to think about regarding self, identity and memory, Sakey’s tale will fit the bill. He has surprises in store, and it’s a wild ride.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 38 readers
PUBLISHER:	Dutton Adult (June 9, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Katherine Petersen
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Marcus Sakey
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Amateurs

Bibliography:

• The Blade Itself (2007)
• At the City’s Edge (2008)
• Good People (2008)
• The Amateurs (2009)
• Scar Tissue: Stories (2010)
• The Two Deaths of Daniel Hayes (June 2011)

“What are we, if not an accumulation of our memories?”

Book Review:

Review by Guy Savage  AUG 4, 2011)

Before I Go to Sleep is a debut novel from British author S.J. Watson, and the book has already made considerable waves in the world of publishing. This is due in part to the fact that film director Ridley Scott bought the movie rights. There’s a big question behind the media blitz: is all the hype justified?

The novel, narrated by Christine, begins when she wakes up in what appears to be a strange room, in a strange bed, and sleeping next to a strange man. Groggy and not fully awake, for a split second she imagines that she’s had some sort of drunken one night stand and has ended up in bed with an older man, but she’s shocked when she goes to the bathroom and catches a glimpse of her refection in the mirror:

“The face I see looking back at me is not my own. The hair has no volume and is cut much shorter than I wear it; the skin on the cheeks and under the chin sags; the lips are thin; the mouth turned down. I cry out, a wordless gasp that would turn into a shriek of shock were I to let it, and then I notice the eyes. The skin around them is lined, yes, but despite everything else, I can see that they are mine. The person in the mirror is me, but I am twenty years too old. Twenty-five. More.”

It’s soon revealed that Christine, now in her late 40s, is an amnesiac. She lives a quiet life alone with her husband, Ben, and due to an accident that occurred 18 years before, she suffers from severe memory impairment, and she cannot “retain new memories.” Each day when Christine wakes up, her memory is basically a blank slate, and she has no memory of the day before. This means that when Christine goes to sleep, she knows that the next day her memory will be wiped clean, and when she wakes she will have no idea how old she is, who her husband is, or what’s happened to the last 18 years of her life. And this terrifying pattern continues repeatedly as she starts each day with the horrifying information that she remembers nothing of her past.

Most of the book takes the form of secret journal entries made by a very vulnerable Christine. The journal is the idea of dedicated young neuropsychologist, Dr. Nash who believes that if Christine writes down her daily experiences, this action may gradually help with memory retention. The journal is secret because Christine’s husband, Ben, who feels that she’s been traumatized enough, does not approve of any further treatment. Nash’s idea may be right, however. Vague memories begin to return, and gradually Christine finds that some things just don’t add up.

Author S.J. Watson very successfully mines our fears by exploring the subject of memory, identity, and the creativity of the imagination. Before I Go to Sleep is an incredible page turner, and the method of parsing out details of Christine’s past through the daily journal entries is a brilliantly executed device. For the first 2/3s of the novel I was hooked and really annoyed at any interruptions to my reading, but then as the clues add up in Christine’s life, I guessed the direction the book was about to take me, and parts of the plot (no spoilers) strained credulity. Up to that point, I reveled in the steadily increasing tension, marveled at the author’s storytelling ability, and appreciated his knack for doling out the details as Christine painfully rebuilds her life day after day while repeatedly learning about her amnesia and her “lost life.” Many readers are really wowed by Before I Go to Sleep, and as a debut novel, it certainly is an impressively good read, but the tale was spoiled for me by guessing some of the crucial plot elements, the issue of credulity, and the ending which jarred with the rest of this tale. I have this niggling feeling that my opinion lands in the minority section. Reservations aside, I am really looking forward to seeing the film version.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 341 readers
PUBLISHER:	Harper; First Edition edition (June 14, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Guy Savage
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	S. J. Watson
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Two Deaths of Daniel Hayes by Marcus Sakey  Memory by Donald E. Westlake Dermarphoria by Craig Clevenger

Bibliography:

• Before I Go to Sleep (June 2011)

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

Book Review:

Review by Doug Bruns  (MAY 27, 2011)

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

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

See what I mean?

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

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

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

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

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

Bibliography:

• Tinkers (2009)
• Enon (September 2013)

“Colourful is only that what she can still remember, surrounded by darkness of which she is at the core, her head […] carries colourful memories, memories of somebody, who she was. Probably was. Who was she? Whose head was her head? Who owns the memories?””

Book Review:

Review by Friederike Knabe  (MAY 2, 2011)

The “Girl,” who ponders these questions, is one of the protagonists in Jenny Erpenbeck’s innovative and powerful novel Visitation. Memories of innocent excitement and happiness of youth, of arriving, settling down, and then having to leave again and of families and people loved and lost form the core of the story. People and events are centred around a lake-side summer house surrounded by expansive woods and gardens in the region just east of Germany’s capital, Berlin, affording it the role as the central character and integrating force of the narrative. Using her zooming lens, the author condenses many decades of twentieth century German history into time-specific, intricate and intimate glimpses into the lives of twelve different residents and their families living on the property. While the owners build and add to the house, change it and its grounds over time, leaving visible marks and impressions, they are in turn impacted by the environment and the historical events occurring beyond it.

Starting out more like a fairy-tale, the novel gains intensity as it progresses: the portraits become more intense, reaching deeper into the background of the individuals, also relating their actions to specific historical time periods of the last decades: from the Weimar Republic, through the Nazi regime and the Holocaust, War and Soviet occupation, to Socialist East Germany and Fall of the Berlin Wall and beyond. The Girl’s haunting account far away, having had to flee her home and Germany, stands out as one of the most heart-wrenching chapters. In others, the reader senses underlying tense emotions, despite the deceptively detached, often sparse language, that refers to most protagonists only as the Architect, the Writer, the Visitor, etc. or the Gardener. However, despite the apparent indistinctness, the individuals portrayed are engagingly realistic and anything but bland generalizations. Events beyond the calm of the summer house are alluded to, hints that may be easier to detect for the German reader. The narrator’s language and style changes slightly as the story moves from one voice to the next. Erpenbeck often uses rhythmic prose, sometimes staccato sentences, repetitions, or lyrical prose to reflect her protagonists’ moods and characteristics. While the different individuals pass through the house as transient residents – some return later, allowing for intergenerational connections – only the “Gardener,” more a symbol than a person, remains as a constant, his chapters alternating with the others.

The original title Heimsuchung has several meanings in German, one of which is “Visitation.” This has an ominous or threatening undertone and often refers to ghosts or disease. An additional meaning contained in the term is “searching for home.” Both connotations are beautifully captured in stories. For example, the Authoress looks back on a long life, that included fleeing the home of her youth all the way to Moscow and the Urals, and, even while “going home” now to the house and the lake, she is still searching for the “home” that she can emotionally return to. On the other hand, the overconfident Architect, a former Albert Speer collaborator, is on the run, the ghosts of the past having caught up with him: he is locking up, hiding the valuables, leaving the key for the next occupant of the house…

Award-winning Jenny Erpenbeck is a representative of the younger generation of German authors (born in 1967). Many like her were born and raised in then East Germany. Their background enables them to take a different perspective on the past. Inspired by and based on her family’s summer house, the author sensitively mixes her own memories and those of people she knew with the wide-ranging fictional reality of her novel. While recent novels like Simon Mawer‘s The Glass Room come to mind, in that comparable techniques were used to build the novels, Erpenbeck’s voice is fresh and independent and very convincing. Visitation, published in German in 2008 and now available in the highly praised translation by Susan Bernofksy, was recently chosen by author Nicole Krauss as one her favorite books of the year.

(Having read the novel in its original, all translations in this review are mine.)

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 9 readers
PUBLISHER:	New Directions; First Edition edition (September 30, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Friederike Knabe
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Jenny Erpenbeck
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	The Vanishing of KatharinaLinden by Helen Grant Another house that inspires an historical story: Sea Glass by Anita Shreve

Bibliography:

• The Old Child & Other Stories (1999; 2005 in US)
• Cats Have Seven Lives (2000)
• Trinkets (2001)
• The Book of Words (2004; 2007 in US)
• Visitation (2004; September 2010 in US)
• Things that Disappear (2009)

“The past, if there is such a thing, is mostly empty space, great expanses of nothing, in which significant persons and events float.”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte  (FEB 8, 2011)

When Julius, a young psychiatrist living in New York, looks out of his apartment window, he likes to watch the birds fly past. And when he occasionally spots geese flying in formation, he wonders how our life below would look like to them. This same external perspective—which one could argue immigrants master especially well—permeates Teju Cole’s debut novel, Open City.

Like Cole, Julius is a Nigerian immigrant to the United States. As the novel opens, we learn that he loves to take walks all over New York City. The walks are freeing, a meditative contemplation not just of the present but also of the past, and Julius treasures them. “As interesting as my research project was—I was conducting a clinical study of affective disorders in the elderly—the level of detail it demanded was of an intricacy that exceeded anything else I had done thus far. The streets served as a welcome opposite to all that,” Julius says, “Every decision—where to turn left, how long to remain lost in thought in front of an abandoned building, whether to watch the sun set over New Jersey, or to lope in the shadows on the East Side looking across to Queens—was inconsequential, and was for that reason, a reminder of freedom.”

As Julius goes on these walks, he holds forth on a wide variety of topics—from the history of New York to the genius of composer Gustav Mahler. He especially enjoys long talks with 89-year-old Professor Saito, a teacher who had taken Julius under his wing when he was still a junior at Maxwell College.

The reader is afforded brief glimpses of Julius’s past—a fractured history with his mother from whom he is estranged just before he leaves for America at the age of seventeen; a military school upbringing which manages to inject some measure of discipline into an otherwise restless life. Julius’s mother is white (a German) and father, Nigerian. His mixed-race status also turns out to lead to his rootlessness. “The name Julius linked me to another place and was, with my passport and skin color, one of the intensifiers of my sense of being different, of being set apart, in Nigeria,” he recalls, “I had a Yoruba middle name, Olatubosun, which I never used. That name surprised me a little each time I saw it on my passport or birth certificate, like something that belonged to someone else but had long been held in my keeping.”

About halfway through the book, Julius takes an extended vacation in Brussels harboring a small hope that he’ll run into his grandmother (mother’s mother) there. He remembers Oma’s brief visit to Nigeria when he was young and despite the strained relationship she had with her daughter, Julius suspects there is more to this story than meets the eye.

It is in Brussels that Julius meets a young Moroccan named Farouq, who runs the Internet café that Julius frequents. Through his voice, Cole again holds forth on the larger political topics of the day including the global war on terror.

Open City, with its meandering ruminations of disparate topics, is not for readers who look for books with specific plot lines and incidents. And while Julius discusses many subjects of immediate interest at length (even the New York City bedbug epidemic gets an airing here), he is less than forthcoming about what seems to have been a less than straightforward past. It is never clear for example exactly what happened between Julius and his mother before he left for the United States. It speaks volumes that one learns more about Julius from an old Nigerian acquaintance he runs into, Moji Kasali, than from Julius himself. Such wandering and unresolved questions might try some readers. But readers who love an informed and intelligent voice and are not averse to freewheeling discussions, will love Open City.

As for Moji, she turns out to be the sister of an old friend of Julius and when he suddenly runs into her in the city, he can’t place her immediately. The important fact she reveals about Julius reminds us about how arbitrary memory and its related associations can be. “Each person must, on some level, take himself as the calibration point for normalcy, must assume that the room of his own mind is not, cannot be, entirely opaque to him,” Julius says, “Perhaps this is what we mean by sanity: that, whatever our self-admitted eccentricities might be, we are not the villains of our own stories.” But if memory is selective how can we ever be sure about our roles in our lives and in those of others? Cole’s Open City is ultimately an exploration of this central theme: Are we truly not the villains of our own stories? Or do we just choose to remember only those parts of our lives that paint us as heroes?

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 96 readers
PUBLISHER:	Random House (February 8, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Teju Cole
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another Nigerian immigrant fiction: The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Another great New York City novel: Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann

Bibliography:

• Open City (2011)
• Every Day is a for the Thief (March 2014)

“It didn’t take long for tensions to build. The three of them – the pretty cheerleader, the sexy burnout too old, too knowing for her age, the geek with gothic leanings – they were all there, these representative of the perennial high school subcultures. Squirming and pink beneath the shells of their adulthoods. Maggie thought that childhood things would be left behind, these silly groupings would fade and become meaningless, but they never were. Not in a town like this. Those teenage girls, each awkward and unsure in her own way, never left the Hollows.”

Book Review:

Review by Vesna McMaster (JAN 08, 2011)

Fragile is set in a small town 100 miles from New York City, called “The Hollows.” The dynamics between family clusters, over the generations within the sometimes stifling small-town boundaries, form the emotional backbone of this well-crafted thriller.

The central group is the Cooper family. With Jones (the father) being the chief detective in the Hollows police force and Maggie (the mother) being a psychologist, they are strategically placed to know what’s going on in town when something out of the ordinary happens. Their son Ricky is a high school student, and the disappearance of his girlfriend Charlene is the signal for the mystery to begin in earnest.

There are two other main family groups. The first group is that of the Murrays: with moody Melody the mother, Charlene the disappearing would-be rock star, and Graham the stepfather with dubious intentions. The second is the Crosbys: the family with a strong current of violence and intimidation, which includes the mostly absent mother Angie, Travis the bully policeman father, and Marshall their deeply troubled son.

The childhood histories of the generation now in their prime are insolubly linked. As their past actions seem to have become part of the silent fabric of the Hollows, a unique dread, like a recurring nightmare, stalks the story as the plot unfolds. Unspoken terror of retributive karma lends the narrative a tinge of ghost-like fear.

Two entwined themes weave through the novel with the intensity of obsession. The first of these is the theme of the lost girl.

No fewer than three lost girls wander through the pages of Fragile. Charlene Murray, the current missing girl, is the novel’s immediate raison d’être. Sarah Myer, from a generation back, brings the weight of the past to the narrative. Charlie the pest-control guy’s Lily brings a resonating chord from the world outside the Hollows.

As Unger states in a note on the text, the core idea for the narrative evolved from an incident in her childhood, where a student went missing from her own high-school. One is left with a distinct impression that the distance of the memory, its initial emotional impact and the diverse aspects in which it has reflected on in the author’s own life have a strong bearing on the general tone of the novel. How memory both changes the future and shapes our perception of what we now are is the subject of the other main theme of the novel: change.

In the most concrete sense, change and the lack of it are built up through family portrayals, in shards of continuity or broken lines. Maggie would like to paint but she’s too busy – meanwhile her mother’s attic is full of her father’s old paintings. Charlie would like to write, and eventually finds out that his father used to write. Charlie’s colleague Wanda knows all about cars because her daddy worked for Ford. The Crosby family are all policemen and bullies– “the gene gets stronger every generation.” Jones hates his mother for dominating his life, but dominates his son and disbelieves him in turn, reflecting his own fears onto Ricky without bothering to think about who the new generation really is.

Which links can or should be broken? What kind of change is possible? Through exploration of these relationships, so circumscribed by location and custom, the novel eventually posits that only by admitting the past – both our own deeds and those of our forbears – and incorporating it into our existence, can we “grow up.”  The crystallisation that hidden fear forces onto a character is a type of stagnation, a decomposition.

Through the pages of carefully-constructed prose one clearly sees a diligent writer taking enviable care in their craft: a writer who hates sloppiness and unintentional ambiguity. This preciseness for a long time seemed to sit at odds with a certain out-of-focus quality to the tenor of the narrative.

Initially I put this characteristic down to lack of immediate “need to write;”  it seemed to suggest meticulous but slightly mechanical work without a great deal of emotional force behind it. This conclusion was somewhat spurred on by the fact that character portrayal in Fragile is extremely female-heavy, and empathy for any character is late in coming. Not to say that we don’t know how the male characters look, behave or think – it’s that we don’t feel what it’s like to be inside them. Not even Jones, who is heavily analysed.

However, as the story progressed it started to become apparent that the emotional freeze imposed on the writing was precisely mirroring that which the characters suffered from. The thaw descends on the structure of the language, the plot, and the characters simultaneously. Such a demonstration of union between language, emotion and story is truly impressive.

I went in a sceptic, and came out a fan. Unger’s Beautiful Lies is already sitting on my shelf, waiting.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 86 readers
PUBLISHER:	Crown; 1 edition (August 3, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Vesna McMaster
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Lisa Unger
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Sliver of Truth Beautiful Lies

Bibliography:

• Beautiful Lies (April 2006)
• Sliver of Truth (January 2007)
• Black Out (May 2008)
• Die for You (June 2009)
• Fragile (August 2010)
• Darkness, My Old Friend (August 2011)