“I squatted immediately as above my head a projectile creased the air and smashed into the opposite wall. An irregular corona of cracks radiated from the impact against the shower tiles, and anchored deep in the center, a pointy barb of a small harpoon. From the direction from whence the projectile had been chucked spewed a fount of the foulest invective. A young woman, hardly more than a girl, swore and cursed like a sailor and stomped her feet in fury. “Whoreson dog, blot, canker! Blast to Hades, I’ve missed.””

Book Review:

Review by Bill Brody  (MAY 31, 2011)

Centuries of June by Keith Donohue is a modern fable revolving around American myths and Hindu concepts of reincarnation. The protagonist is a man who awakens to find himself with a hole in the back of his head and no idea of who he is or who the eight nude women sleeping in his bed might be. An elderly figure who he believes is the ghost of Samuel Beckett helps him into the bathroom and then saves his life from each woman as they attack him in historical order of when they were wronged by him in his past lives.

This is a love story told through five centuries of American myth by the eight women from his bed, each who loved our protagonist more deeply, wisely and passionately than he could reciprocate. Each was wronged in some way or another. The cycle of fables starts with a tale told by S’ee, a Tlingit (Northwest Coast Alaskan Indian) woman of 500 years ago who marries a grizzly bear and ends with a story told by Sita at our protagonist’s wake to his brother in the present time.

Sita is the last girlfriend, a contemporary woman who grew up listening to tales from the Ramayana told by her Bengali father, a doctor in the United States. During the course of the story we move forward in time by roughly 75 year jumps and visit, among other times and places, Honus Wagner’s Pittsburg (note archaic spelling), early 19th century New Orleans with slavery, voodoo and the invention of New Orleans cuisine and the California gold rush of 1849.

Each of the chapters is told by one of the wronged women in the style of the period without being overly cute with obscure usage or spelling. There are references to Native American myth, to noir detective stories of the 1950’s and to William Shakespeare’s Tempest. Reference to Samuel Beckett and Waiting for Godot is explicit. Donohue’s colonial era tales and style remind me of John Barth.

Regardless of literary references or allusions, Centuries of June is a whole lot of fun to read. I enjoyed it immensely and could not wait to read the next installment and find out how our hero was going to be attacked, by whom and why. It became clear early on that this was a tale of reincarnation and so I kept wondering if he was going to learn anything from this parade of cautionary fables detailing the mistakes and failures of ethics, loyalty and passion in his past lives. The weave of different styles of writing is refreshing and a lot of fun. Mr. Donohue has a great sense of humor, and eyes and ears for the absurd. I look forward to more of his well-crafted and inventive novels.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 1 readers
PUBLISHER:	Crown (May 31, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Bill Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Keith Donohue
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Stolen Child

Bibliography:

• The Stolen Child (May 2006)
• Angels of Destruction (March 2009)
• Centuries of June (May 2011)

“… What happened? He thinks, and marvels that he can recall human speech. With great effort, Tucker draws himself onto his hands and knees and crawls down the breezeway to her shut bedroom door. He puts his eye against her keyhole.

There, Cora Alley, freshly dismounted, is wriggling back into the soft folds of empty arms and legs; she, too, returning to her human skin.”

Book Review:

Review by Bill Brody  (MAR 3, 2011)

Witches on the Road Tonight by Sheri Holman is a tale of intergenerational witches that takes place in four different time frames between the 1930’s and the present. The plot moves back and forth between generations and characters. This requires a bit of concentration, but is well worth the effort. It has something of the fears that rise from ghost stories told around a campfire.

The novel begins with Eddie lying down prepared to die. He is in the casket he inherited from his mother, Cora Alley. Eddie has cancer and has taken an overdose of pills. He has left a message for his daughter, Wallis, to call him. For twenty years Eddie was Captain Casket, campy horror show host, and this is the casket from which he would rise during his TV show.

When Eddie was young, a couple came through his home community of Panther Gap in Appalachia to document rural life for the WPA. The two are Tucker, a writer and Sophie, a photographer. Tucker injures Eddie when Eddie runs without warning in front of the car. Tucker and Sophie take the injured Eddie home to recover, but no one is there when they arrive. While waiting for Eddie’s mother, Cora, to come home Tucker shows Eddie an antique horror movie. Just then Cora comes home from a day collecting ginseng roots. Cora’s impact on Tucker is profound.

Cora is a mountain witch, someone who crawls out of her skin at night and then rides men like they were horses. She rides them to exhaustion. If she fancies a man, she will ride him over and over until he is not much good to anyone else; not his wife; not his employer. Cora rides Tucker on successive nights. He is sexually stimulated, humiliated and completely exhausted. He asks Eddie how to avoid being kept in a witch’s power. Eddie tells Tucker never to loan anything to a witch or you are hers forever, but Tucker loans the movie to Cora. The next thing we see is Tucker running through the woods shedding clothing as some creature, we presume the panther of Panther Gap, devours him.

Wallis is Eddie’s daughter, the granddaughter of Cora and is also a witch. Like Cora, she harnesses a powerful sexual appetite. Near the end of Eddie’s career as Captain Casket and when Wallis was on the verge of adolescence, Eddie and his wife take in Jasper, a homeless young man. Jasper has been hanging around the TV station where Eddie works, and Eddie has become fond of the young man. Jasper’s intrusion into the family is a burden to twelve-year-old Wallis. She is constantly provoked by Jasper for whom she develops a powerful sexual attraction. The day after Eddie’s twenty-year reign as a horror show host is over, Eddie, Jasper and Wallis leave town and travel to Panther Gap to Cora’s home in the mountains. While they are there the ghost-story atmosphere intensifies. Jasper, Wallis and Eddie find the remnants of Tucker’s clothing confirming the tale Eddie told Jasper of Cora’s role in Tucker’s disappearance.

Wallis is currently an anchorwoman. The dying Eddie left her a phone message while she was on the air. You get the sense that Wallis is annoyed with Eddie. In the afterglow of her show she has not checked her messages, going instead, as she does regularly, to have a sexual fling with Jeff, one of the crew. Jeff’s come-on to Wallis is the revelation that the Jeff was a card-carrying fan of Captain Casket. Wallis has her fling and then tries to get a ride home, but it is late and the car doesn’t come. Dogs howl in the night and she is afraid. She remembers what happened at Panther Gap and what happened to Jasper in the aftermath. Then she listens to Eddie’s phone massage, a slurred reference to going on a ginseng hunt, their code for an adventure. Jasper, too, went on a ginseng hunt; so did Tucker. Wallis screams and Jeff takes her back into his apartment to comfort her. She feels compelled to tell the ghost story about the visit to Panther Gap by Wallis, Eddie and Jasper.

Being witches, Wallis and Cora bend men to their wills often to tragic ends. Witchcraft can be seen in light of the war between the sexes. A witch is the embodiment of women’s powers and their sexuality. For men, a witch is to be feared and desired. For women such as Wallis, a witch is what you become when the power of your magical thinking comes to pass. In some ways Witches on the Road Tonight reinforces a masculine objectification of powerful women as witches. The female protagonists are all powerful women; they all manipulate their men.

I really enjoyed the book and recommend it highly. It is an extremely well-written and pleasantly complex adult ghost story.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 6 readers
PUBLISHER:	Atlantic Monthly Press (March 1, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Bill Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Sheri Holman
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More mountain magic: Bloodroot by Amy Green

Bibliography:

• The Stolen Tongue (1997)
• The Dress Lodger (2000)
• The Mammoth Cheese (2004)
• Witches on the Road Tonight (March 2011)

For Kids:

• Sondok: Princess of the Moon and Stars (2002)

“This is the kind of story the Jade Emperor himself enjoys hearing from me, one where the focus, indeed the whole point of the tale, is the grand heroic choice, the cinematic action. He is always telling me to hurry up, to cut out the needless detail, to do some editing and present him with the stripped-down version. But life is not like that. The fight to ensure the survival of love is more likely to find its toughest battles amid small snarls about changing nappies or midnight feedings or plain old boredom; it is more likely to focus on little betrayals or hurtful slips of the tongue, to feature the day-to-day heroism of pretending not to be aware of a thousand little annoying habits. In short, love is hard work, and the fairytale ending of our story is only the beginning of the hard work of keeping love alive.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (DEC 7, 2010)

If this book doesn’t attain the high readership it deserves, there is no justice. It’s quite simply one of the most lavishly imagined, masterfully researched, exquisitely written contemporary novels I’ve read. And if that sounds as if I’m gushing…well, it’s probably because I am.

Under Fishbone Clouds is written by debut author Sam Meekings, who grew up near the south coast of England and currently resides in China. It is absolutely remarkable that the author is under 30; the book is full of gravitas and maturity that is normally the result of decades of living and writing. Interwoven seamlessly within this mesmerizing narrative is Chinese folklore and myths – absorbingly told – in addition to insights into Chinese distant and recent past history.

This novel is narrated by the Kitchen God, a common household deity who is challenged by the more powerful Jade Emperor to fathom the inner workings of the human heart. He chooses to follow a couple who, like him and his own mythical wife, were caught in the whirlwind of history: Jinyi and his wife Yuying. The tale begins in 1942 when the two fall in love, in spite of their different backgrounds and their arranged marriage, and continues to their doddering old age as the new millennium takes hold.

At the onset, Yuying follows her husband across war-torn China to her husband’s rustic and impoverished home. Bad times ensue, and when they eventually make their way back to the city, the Cultural Revolution has begun; everything now belongs to the state and all social strata are forced to undergo hard labor in the factories and the fields.

Although the Mao Cultural Revolution years have been well documented, Under Fishbone Clouds takes you up close and personal to these dehumanizing times; it is a rare reader who will not wince at the no-holds-barred look at a country whose rigid ideology trumps personal relationships and freedoms. Business owners, entrepreneurs, artists, teachers, intellectuals – all are labeled “bourgeois” and re-educated in the harshest possible ways. In a particularly harrowing scene, a man has a heart attack and is ordered to “crawl” to comfort and stop being a slacker. The depths to which Jinyi and Yuying are forced to descend to – separately, without each other’s comfort – is heartbreaking.

Yuying reflects, “Life isn’t meant for perfect things. I knew it when we were told to put making steel above common sense; I knew it when we were told to starve patriotically because the noble peasants had been huddling around homemade furnaces instead of growing food in the fields; I knew it when the whole country began to rise up to cut down the past. I felt in the pit of my stomach all the time; I just never knew what it was until now.”

Yet despite the intensity of the Cultural Revolution years, Under Fishbone Clouds is not a book about tragedy; at its heart (and a big heart it is), it’s a family saga about the universal and enduring power of love. There is sheer magic and lyricism in the love that Jinyi and Yuying share as they navigate answers that are often impenetrable.

And, Meekings suggests, by love we are transfigured. Jinyi realizes toward the end of his life: “Love also changes shape. It is no longer slim, lithe, nervous and sweaty palmed. It was no longer sleepless, heavy, a stone weighing deep within the chest. It was now warm, slow, soft, a tarry old blanket huddled under in the dark. It was the last embers of a promise made decades before, still glowing red though the flames had petered down.”

Using Jinyi as a catalyst, the Kitchen God comes to the realization that people don’t just carry on with their lives because they must; the secret of life is love, atonement, and retribution. He puzzles out the human heart as he follows this couple through all kinds of trials: deep anguish, death of children, famine and forced labor, class warfare, drastic social and culture changes, isolation and homelessness, the loss of dignity and health.

Under Fishbone Clouds is one of those rare books that I would confidently recommend to anybody: those with an interest in the history of the East, those who are enthralled with mythology and folklore, those who hold out for the best of prose, and those who are simply seeking an old-fashioned story where love prevails. I predict an amazing future for this very talented author.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 23 readers
PUBLISHER:	Thomas Dunne Books; First Edition edition (December 7, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Living Scotsman interview with Sam Meekings
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More novels based on Mao Cultural Revolution: A Dictionary of Maqiao by Han Shaogong Becoming Madam Mao by Anchee Min And a current novel that it can be compared to: The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell

Bibliography:

• Under Fishbone Clouds (2009; December 2010 in US)

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

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte (FEB 3, 2010)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bibliography:

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

Non-fiction:

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

“ It is not always easy for people to move from one region of the world to another and make a fresh go of it. It is not always sufficient to live in an unpopulated field, or even an entire unpopulated freshwater basin, and call it your own.”

Book Review:

Review by Doug Bruns (DEC 12, 2009)

Earlier this summer  I went to a book reading here in Maine where I live. The author, Jessica Anthony was local, and that always brings in a nice crowd. We have a lot of good writers in Maine. Of course there is Stephen King, up in Bangor, whom everyone knows; and there’s Phil Hoose, who just recently won the National Book Award. But there are a lot of writers around here who aren’t as well known, and many of them are very talented. I had not heard of Ms. Anthony, but I was obviously in the minority, for she seemed a favorite of the crowd the evening of her reading–and it was a crowd. Chris, the owner of the bookstore, introduced her, calling her brilliant and her book brilliant too. But Chris says this about a lot of the writers he introduces. They are either brilliant, or if not brilliant, their book can’t be put down. Sometimes it’s one or the other. Tonight, it was both–and the book was brilliant too, as I said. Ms. Anthony approached the podium and said hello to her many friends in the audience, talked briefly about the book, and began to read.

As she read, I was first struck by the quality of the writing. It was assured and confident. It had heft to it, like you want from good writing, like the difference between a sauce reduced from ingredients on the stove and a one poured from the jar. This writing seemed measured and lovingly created. Good writing catches my eye, or I should say ear, like nothing else. Like pornography, it is difficult to describe, but I know it when I see–hear–it. This was good writing like that. But it was the story that truly hooked me. The Convalescent is the story of Rovar Ákos Pfliegman. Here is Rovar giving a brief description of himself: “I’m barely human. I’m a hairy little Hungarian pulp. An incongruous mass of skin and blood and hair. I am a sorry gathering of organs. That is all.” See what I mean?

Rovar lives in an abandoned broken-down bus in a field on the banks of the Queenconococheecook River in Northern Virginia, from which is sells meat. He is a butcher who hails from a long tradition of butchers–and he is the last of the line. He is a species unto himself. He is diminutive, midget-like, and has a leg which drags behind him. His skin peels off in flakes. He is mute and writes, when he infrequently feels like communicating, on a tablet. He only has one set of clothes, including the stained and foul pink Disneyland sweatshirt he always wears. He is bearded and unkept. He is, by any measure, repugnant. Indeed, even his name–”It is a Hungarian name. It’s pronounced RO-vahr. It means ‘insect’”–brands him. He lives his life with general equanimity despite it all, seeking only one solace, Dr. Monica, the local pediatrician. She sees Rovar every Tuesday, against the wishes of her staff, amidst the stares and gawking of the patients, “the Sick or Diseased children,” who fill the Doctor’s reception area. She treats his skin, massages his trachea, alters his diet, counsels him. She tries to do what doctors do: heal. But Rovar is beyond healing, something we have sensed from the outset. Rovar is hardly human, enough human to lend plausibility, but lacking thereof in a magical way. As the novel progresses his condition deteriorates. He hallucinates, grows paranoid and generally decays. Or so we think. But this story is not just any story. It is a story laced with super heros, and giants, great rivers born streaming from birthing women and humans who perhaps aren’t.

Ms. Anthony said in an interview, that she usually does “not write strict realism; but nor do I consider myself a magic realist–I think I sort of float between the two, in some murky, absurd realm. Let’s call it Absurdorealism.” There is the experience, while reading The Convalescent, of being like an insect, airborne and tasting one flower then the next, one sensation following on the heels of another. Everything makes sense, then not, then you wonder: Is this absurd, or literal? It is great fun. It is not a coincidence I use the flying insect metaphor. Insects are in evidence here. Rovar keeps one as a pet in a can and feeds it bits of rotten food. As a young boy, or more properly, as a young Pfliegman, Rovar as he “lies in bed watching a fly hurtling around the edges of the window screen…wishes he were an insect. If he were an insect, he thinks, he would be invisible. O, to be a fly, a flea, he thinks, observing the small things about his room. The things that insects observe. The curl of paint on the window ledge. The jagged fray of the blanket. The sound of bees throwing themselves at the window screen. He pinches his arms and watches the hairs rise up. He presses his fingers on the his eyeballs until globes of light appear behind the eyelids, each taking the triangular shape of the wings of a butterfly–” If only Gregor Samsa had had so much desire, rather than dread.

Perhaps this reader’s delight was most in evidence in the chapters tracing Rovar’s ancestry, or rather the “Evolution of the Pfliegmans.” Interlaced with the straight-absurd narration of Rovar, we are treated to an absurdorealism walk through the history of Eastern Europe, cave-man to present. It is simply wondrous. Here is an example, from early on. Rovar is asked by Dr. Monica to open up, to communicate, as best he is able, using his writing table, to “write what I feel.” And so the Pfliegman mythology unfurls:

“Although it is difficult for me to write how I feel, I can tell you how Aranka felt as she lay on her side in front of a fire amidst the pungent, simmering remains of Enni Hús. She felt thirst, but there was no water. She felt the weight of isolation, of inevitability: this child would take her, or she would take the child. She gazed up at the uneven flaps of the tent, listening to the purring sounds of a hundred dozing Pfliegmans–she was savagely alone. Most Plfliegman fetuses, she knew, did not survive birth. As though they could sense it, as though they could see their whole lousy future before they even had a chance to live it, they hoped for better luck in the next conception and gave up in the womb. If they managed to be born, the babies were often so small they looked like little blue fish. Babies born off-color, with elongated heads, mealy skin. Feet that hung inward in hackneyed flippers. An aura of general malaise.”

This book, like a great myth, can be read on many levels. It can read as a tracing of existential nausea, a modern farce, a tract on the consequences of modern living, a quasi-adolescent coming-of-age fantasy memoir. It could be all this, none of it, or something else entirely. Mostly it is fun and witty and sharp. I would say how excited I am by this new voice of Jessica Anthony, but like Rovar, I sense the voice is an old-soul, not new at all, but one that has sprung afresh from an ancient mist.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 7 readers
PUBLISHER:	McSweeney’s (June 1, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Doug Bruns
AMAZON PAGE:	The Convalescent
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Another  interview with Jessica Anthony
EXTRAS:	Excerpt A short story
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Other brilliant debuts: Wonder When You’ll Miss Me by Amanda Davis And Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris The Book of Salt by Monica Truong Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer

Bibliography:

• The Convalescent (June 2009)