Real People Fiction – MostlyFiction Book Reviews We Love to Read! Sat, 28 Oct 2017 19:51:27 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.4.24 BURIAL RITES by Hannah Kent /2014/burial-rites-by-hannah-kent/ Thu, 10 Apr 2014 12:55:58 +0000 /?p=25743 Book Quote:

“I hope they will leave some men behind, to make sure she doesn’t kill us in our sleep.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (APR 10, 2014)

Twenty-eight-year-old Australian author Hannah Kent spent time in Iceland while in high school, chosen because she wanted to see snow for the first time. She fell in love with this island country south of the Arctic Circle, and returned several times to do extensive research on Agnes Magnúsdóttir, the last woman to be beheaded in Iceland, in 1829. Kent imagined the interior psychological states of various characters, especially the enigmatically alluring Agnes, and has successfully penned a suspenseful fiction tale that transcends the outcome. It reveals a complex love triangle and double murder, and a provocative examination of the religious and social mores of the time. Knowing the fate of Agnes prior to reading the novel won’t change the reader’s absorption of the novel. The strong themes hinge on the backstory and viewpoints that are woven in and reveal characters that go through a change of perception as the circumstances of the crime come to light.

Each chapter begins with official or private correspondence or testimony, which reflects the judicial process and established standards of the time, which was then under Danish rule. The title refers to whether the dead are fit to be buried on consecrated ground. Agnes is sent to northwest Iceland, to stay with the district officer, his wife, and two daughters, pending her execution. The family members are outraged at first, some more than others. The farmers in the area are also hostile to her. Over time, as her story unfolds, I became emotionally engaged with Agnes, and touched by the young cleric, Toti, Agnes’ appointed spiritual advisor.

Kent is a poetic writer, whose descriptions of a grim, harsh, bleak landscape and a socially rigid terrain are told with a striking beauty.

“Now we are riding across Iceland’s north, across this black island washing in its waters, sulking in its ocean. Chasing our shadows across the mountain.”

“They have strapped me to the saddle like a corpse being taken to the burial ground.”

“…waiting for the ground to unfreeze before they can pocket me in the earth like a stone.”

The restrained savagery and cruel irony reflects in those that persecute Agnes and accept the official story of her acts as gospel. The gradual overtures of Toti and certain members of the family were organically developed, allowing for tension and intimacy in equal measure. The slight stumbling block for me was accepting Agnes’ relationship with her lover, Natan, one of the men she is convicted of killing. I understand that very smart women can often make poor choices in men; however, Agnes was depicted as a self-contained woman. I had a difficult time accepting her bottomless apology for Nathan’s consummate cruelty and selfish barbarity.

Despite my tenuous acceptance of Agnes’ love for Natan, I did register the isolated, punishing terrain of 19th century Iceland, especially in the winter months, when loneliness was crushing, and reaching out for companionship a pressing need. The landscape came alive as a character, and Kent folded in an Icelandic Burial Hymn and bits and pieces of the Nordic sagas and myths, such as “I was worst to the one I loved best.” Poet-Rosa, who also loved Natan as passionately as Agnes, writes a bitter poem to her. (Interestingly, I have just read the first 80 pages of the Laxness novel of Icelandic sheep farmers, Independent People, in which a character named poet-Rosa is described.)

This is an impressive debut novel, easily read in a few sittings. The point-of-view shifts back and forth from third to first skillfully. By the end of the novel, I was able to answer the question of whether a condemned life can have meaning, and whether the person who is condemned can change the perceptions of others –for the better. I will be looking out for Kent’s next novel.

AMAZON READER RATING: from 699 readers
PUBLISHER: Back Bay Books (April 1, 2014)
REVIEWER: Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Hannah Kent
EXTRAS: Interview and Excerpt
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]]> BEAUTIFUL RUINS by Jess Walter /2014/beautiful-ruins-by-jess-walter/ Sun, 16 Mar 2014 14:05:04 +0000 /?p=23895 Book Quote:

“After she disappeared inside the hotel, Pasquale entertained the unwieldy thought that he’d somehow summoned her, that after years of living in this place, after months of grief and loneliness and waiting for Americans, he’d created this woman from old bits of cinema and books, from the lost artifacts and ruins of his dreams, from his epic, enduring solitude.“

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (MAR 16, 2014)

After looking up various images of the 1963 movie Cleopatra, the film that critically bombed but was lit up by the scandal of Liz Taylor and Richard Burton, I saw a coastline of Italy that looked exactly like the cover of this book. It is a most felicitous cover that captures the mood and time that this novel begins, in 1962. A parochial innkeeper, Pasquali Tursi, lives in a rocky coastline village called Porto Vergogna (Port of Shame), a place the size of a thumb between two mountains, and referred to as “the whore’s crack.”

One day, Pasquali is stunned by the vision of a young, striking, blonde American actress, Dee Moray and baffled as to why she is staying at his inn. He learns that she is sick, and waiting for the famous publicity agent, Michael Deane, to take her to Switzerland for treatment. She stays at the ramshackle inn for a few days. Walter depicts their friendship with exquisite wistfulness and beauty. Her Italian and his English are as rocky as the cliffs surrounding the village, but a meeting of the souls eclipses language. On an outing together, they climb the cliffs high above the Ligurian Sea so that Pasquali can show Dee five frescoes painted on the wall inside a machine-gun pillbox bunker left over from World War II. At this scene, I almost wept. These frescoes become the most poignant visual metaphor of the book.

Alvis Bender, an American writer with writer’s block, traumatized from his experience in the war, stays at the inn annually, and has left his one devastating chapter in the drawer in Dee’s room. It is an astonishing chapter, one of the highlights of the novel. It is a treat to witness the variety of stories that make up Walter’s one larger story.

The novel alternates non-linearly from 1962 to contemporary time in Hollywood, Calfornia, where Claire Silver, a scholar of film archives, works for the now legendary film producer Michael Deane. Claire is on the cusp of quitting her job and leaving her boyfriend, and is suffering from several regrets. She is braced for another insipid film pitch when she receives a surprising visitor.

In this pensive, reflective, aesthetically pleasing, and geographically stunning story, we meet a disparate cast of characters that are ultimately linked. There’s also a washed-up rock musician, a frustrated screenwriter, and a cameo appearance by a certain alcoholic son of a Welsh coal miner–a brief but rollicking insertion of a true-to-life legend that is so spectacular and credible, it almost outshines the rest of the book. But the rest of the novel is exquisite, so that the scenes in repose combine with eye-popping chapters, and give the book a sublime balance.

The story has an undulating, timeless presence. Patience is rewarded, as it ascends toward its peak with a languid pace. The outcome may be a little too neat for some readers, but it is a minor flaw that is incidental to the mature and subtle elegance rendered on every page. As time passes, it continues to echo with its alluring characters, resonating themes, and delicate visual beauty and symmetry.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 1,407 readers
PUBLISHER: Harper Perennial; Reprint edition (April 2, 2013)
REVIEWER: Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Jess Walter
EXTRAS: Excerpt
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]]> THE GHOST OF MARY CELESTE by Valerie Martin /2014/the-ghost-of-mary-celeste-by-valerie-martin/ /2014/the-ghost-of-mary-celeste-by-valerie-martin/#comments Thu, 30 Jan 2014 13:08:53 +0000 /?p=25309 Book Quote:

“She felt she had been created by the demands of others, by their insatiable appetite for something beyond ordinary life. They craved a world without death and they had spotted her, in their hunger, like wolves alert to any poor sheep that might stray from the fold and stand gazing ignorantly up at the stars.”

Book Review:

Review by Jana L. Perskie  (JAN 30, 2014)

FACT: “The Mary Celeste,” (or “Marie Céleste” as it is fictionally referred to by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and others after him), was a British-built American-owned merchant brigantine famous for having been discovered on 5 December 1872 in the Atlantic Ocean, between the Azores and Portugal, unmanned and apparently abandoned, (the one lifeboat was missing, along with its 7 member crew, the captain, his wife and small daughter). The ship was in seaworthy condition and still under sail heading toward the Strait of Gibraltar. She had been at sea for a month and its cargo and provisions were intact. The crew’s belongings including valuables were still in place. There was no sign of foul play. None of those on board was ever seen or heard from again and their disappearance is often cited as the greatest maritime mystery of all time. There was nothing written in the ship’s log to account for the vanishing. ” (Wikipedia entry)

I was riveted from page one by this very realistic fictional account of the “The Mary Celeste.” The story and some of the book’s fascinating characters are quite eerie and mysterious. There are scenes, especially those at sea, which are terrifyingly lifelike. I could hardly put the book down. Many have speculated and written about the real life story of this ghost ship, including investigative journalists and authors, one of whom is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, a character here. There are many theories about her disappearance but none have proved to be true and none have proved to be false, either. For the seafaring families of New England who captained and crewed the ship, the nautical mystery has haunted them for generations. No one, to this day, knows what happened to “The Mary Celeste,” and all who sailed on her.

The Ghost of the Mary Celeste opens with a vivid account of a shipwreck in which the captain and his wife, Marie, are lost overboard. Back in Massachusetts a thirteen year-old girl, a relative of the ill-fated couple, is convinced that she sees and hears the cries of her cousin Marie.

The reader is then introduced to the Briggs and Cobb families from Marion, Massachusetts. The two families are intimately connected in an intricate sort of way, which I won’t try to explain here. Let it suffice to say that the Briggs and Cobb children are cousins. The Briggs family has always made its livelihood from the sea, however by the time young Captain Benjamin Briggs marries his first cousin, Sarah, (Sallie), Cobb, his unfortunate family had already lost many members to the ocean. Benjamin plans to retire his captaincy after his marriage. However, he does decide to accept one more command and Sallie and their two year-old daughter Sophy accompany him on this last voyage. Their son, Arthur is left home with his paternal grandmother, “Mother Briggs.”

It is important to mention that Sallie has a younger sister, Hannah, with whom she is quite close. The fey Hannah “sees things.” She has strange dreams/nightmares and is quite fantastical. “As a child she always had her dreamy side. She talked to trees and made up stories. She wrote sweet poems about the dew being dropped from the drinking cups of fairies, or enchanted woods where elves had tea parties using mushrooms as tables.” However, with the loss of her beloved cousin Marie, 13 year-old Hannah sees and hears Marie calling to her. Her family disapproves of her “visions and fantasies.” Sallie rebukes her after one bout of almost hysterical lamentations that Marie is there and “wants to come inside.” Their father is concerned, naturally.

Late-19th-century spiritualism plays an important role here. Spiritualism, the belief that the dead communicate with the living, became a fad throughout America and Europe during the 1850s. Spiritualism was a cultural and religious phenomenon which swept through the sitting rooms and village halls of Victorian and Edwardian Britain. Basically dead people were all the rage. Sallie’s and Hannah’s father, in particular, is worried about his youngest daughter’s fervent beliefs and visions. “It’s this insalubrious craze with talking to spirits: it’s loose in the world.” He fears that, as she grew older, Hannah would become involved in this movement.

Author Valerie Martin employs multiple voices, styles and points of view. She takes the reader through time and place, in a variety of means, to tell her tale through a straightforward, third person narrative, and also through her characters, their conversations, diaries, letters, newspaper clippings, legal court findings, ship’s log, etc. We are introduced to a young Arthur Conan Doyle, who, intrigued by the entire incident of the ghost ship, writes a fictitious and “scurrilous story,” supposedly told to him by a crewman who said he survived the incident. The actual story, “J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement,” was printed anonymously in the British journal Cornhill. The story sparked Doyle’s literary career. “He was thirty-five years-old. With scarcely a hint of what he might achieve, but driven by a furnace of ambition to strive in every field that opened before him. He made himself up.”

Doyle’s tale travels across the Atlantic to America where Violet Petra, a famous medium of extraordinary powers, reads it and threatens to sue Doyle for his lies about the Briggs family and the nautical mystery. And, Miss Petra, one of the famed spiritualists of her day, spiritual society’s darling, who is she? Has this inscrutable woman also invented herself?

Phoebe Grant, a journalist employed by the Philadelphia Sun is to investigate Violet Petra for fraud. The intelligent and business-like Miss Grant is a quick-witted skeptic who finds herself totally confounded upon meeting and speaking with the woman. They eventually become friends “of sorts.” She says this about Violet and her supporters,

“The spirits they peddled had no mystery; they were ghosts stripped of their otherness. In their cosmography, the dead were just like us and they were everywhere, waiting to give us yet more unsolicited advice.”

The books has several characters, the primary ones being Violet Petra, Mr. Doyle and Phoebe Grant, the ghost ship, and of course the sea. All the characters are eventually tied together by the “Mary Celeste.” The novel spans decades and the author fleshes out her characters and allows us to see how they grow and change.

I really enjoyed The Ghost of the Mary Celeste and am mystified by the mystery. Ms. Martin creates an extraordinary fiction from facts. This is a page-turner written with intelligence and originality. The author uses as much historical detail as possible and, in fact, at times the book reads more like a history than historical fiction. I was surprised by the ending. Although one has to use the imagination to figure out parts of the story, the finale is indeed unsuspected…at least by me. I am left with a head filled with questions. Kudos to Valerie Martin. I now want to read more of her books.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 25 readers
PUBLISHER: Nan A. Talese (January 28, 2014)
REVIEWER: Jana Perskie
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Valerie Martin
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

Another New England unsolved mystery:

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]]> /2014/the-ghost-of-mary-celeste-by-valerie-martin/feed/ 1 ABOVE ALL THINGS by Tanis Rideout /2014/above-all-things-by-tanis-rideout/ Mon, 06 Jan 2014 12:45:54 +0000 /?p=23885 Book Quote:

“Tell me the story of Everest,” she said, a fervent smile sweeping across her face, creasing the corners of her eyes. “Tell me about this mountain that’s stealing you away from me.”

Book Review:

Review by Jana L. Perskie  (JAN 6, 2014)

Above All Things is the fictional story of George Mallory’s third and final attempt to conquer Mount Everest. I am no mountain climber but those who climb and “conquer” mountains have always fascinated me as does the process these mountaineers undergo to make a successful climb. Years ago I read Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air, and then Simon Mawer’s The Fall and I was hooked. To me, Everest has always been the “Big One.” Mount Everest is the highest mountain in the world, its peak rising more than 29,000 feet. Back in the early 20th century it was a mountain that had defeated and/or killed all who attempted to scale her. Mallory and his team had made two attempts and failed. Unfortunately, today more than 3,500 people have successfully climbed the 29,029 ft. mountain and more than a tenth of that number scaled the peak just over the past year. On one day alone in 2012, 234 climbers reached the peak, (a bit crowded)….leaving their “junk” all over the mountain. As more and more people try to test themselves against Everest, often paying over $100,000 for a “guided climb,” most of the people with ambition to scale the mountain, and the money to pay, can reach the summit. Of course modern climbing gear technology and very experienced Sherpas make the difference.

But back in 1924 things were quite different. Many faced the mountain with determination and died making the climb without oxygen and battling the ferocious elements. Mallory joined the 1924 Everest expedition, led, as in 1922, by General Bruce. Mallory believed that, due to his age (he was 37 years old at the time of the ascent), it would be his last opportunity to climb the mountain and, when touring the US, proclaimed that that expedition would successfully reach the summit. The question is whether George really did reach the summit…or not. Historians will probably never know the real story. Mallory died on the mountain. But did he die returning from the summit or on his way to the top? This is a question that has plagued many people for years.

Howard Somervell, a close friend of George Mallory’s and fellow mountaineer who once attempted Everest, watched Mallory leave on his last attempt to climb the mountain in June 1924. Somervell said, “after the final attempt, Mallory had forgotten his camera. Somervell lent his friend his own camera. “So if my camera was ever found,” he said, “you could prove that Mallory got to the top.'”

In 1999,an expedition was organized, funded by the BBC. The purpose was to find Somervell’s camera. Instead the searchers found Mallory’s body. There was no camera, though, and still no answer to the biggest mystery in mountaineering: who climbed Mount Everest first? Opinion remains divided and the discovery of Mallory’s frozen corpse in 1999 failed to yield definitive evidence either way. You will have to read this historical novel to decide for yourself whether he made the peak and was the first man to stand on that extraordinary and virginal spot.

Above All Things is also a love story – actually a love triangle. Mallory and his wife, Ruth, loved each other deeply. She supported him, outwardly, in his endeavors. They had 3 children together. However, her husband was fatally obsessed with his love for a mountain – Ruth’s incomparable rival. The narrative alternates between Ruth, doing the housework and taking care of the children at home in Cambridge, and Mallory climbing and struggling on the slopes. She does want him to succeed but she is afraid, as anyone would be. She wants to live a “normal life” with a full time husband. The couple wrote constantly but as Mallory and his team moved further and further away from civilization, it became more and more difficult to send and receive mail.

The tension really increases when Mallory makes the final ascent with 21-year-old teammate Sandy Irvin.

Above All Things is a gripping, suspenseful and beautifully written novel….poetic at times. There are no spoilers in this review as the finale is history. Ruth’s narrative is at times heartbreaking as she waits daily for word from George. George, meanwhile comes closer to death with every page. Avalanches and falling ice, hypothermia, the extremely high-altitude, pulmonary edema, excessive fatigue, confusion, etc., were and are major causes of death when scaling mountains such as Everest. Many of Mallory’s team, who lived to tell the tale, recounted these hardships.

Tanis Rideout’s characters are quite complex. The extensive research undertaken in order to write Above All Things is obvious, and the real letters, salvaged, between Ruth and Mallory truly give insight into their relationship and characters.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 71 readers
PUBLISHER: Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam (February 12, 2013)
REVIEWER: Jana L. Perskie
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Tanis Rideout
EXTRAS: Reading Guide and Essay
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

Bibliography:

]]> MURDER AS A FINE ART by David Morrell /2013/murder-as-a-fine-art-by-david-morrell/ Tue, 03 Dec 2013 12:45:17 +0000 /?p=23578 Book Quote:

“May I touch the corpses?”

As with so much of what De Quincey said, the request suddenly seemed to be the most normal in the world. “If you think it’s necessary.”

“I do.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (DEC 2, 2013)

Murder as a Fine Art by David Morrell is one of the best mystery books I’ve read this year. It is historically based, taking place in the nineteenth century. As some of you may know, Morrell is best-known for his book, First Blood, upon which the the Rambo movies are based. Murder as a Fine Art is very different from his first writings. It is literary fiction and page-turning at its best.

Set in the Victorian London, the story is about a serial killer and mass murderer who appears to be copying The Ratcliffe Murders which took place 43 years before the current murders. The current murders are indeed gruesome, the first one killing a storekeeper, his wife, a maid, and two children. The murderer uses a mallet and razor as his tools.

The murderer uses the essay by the distinguished Thomas de Quincey,  Murder as a Fine Art, as his guide. DeQuincey wrote that essay in 1827 about the Ratcliffe Highway Murders but is most famous for his scandulous book Confessions of an Opium-Eater.   De Quincey is hooked on Laudanum, a strong opiate-based liquid, which, at that time, could be purchased over the counter at most pharmacies  De Quincey is accompanied everywhere by his loyal and loving 24-years-old daughter Emily. She cares for her father with the utmost love.

Two detectives, Ryan and Becker, are told to arrest de Quincey but they end up sure that he is not the murderer and de Quincey ends up helping them to solve the crime. Because he wrote the essay that the real murderer imitates, he has insight into the clues and motivations that others miss.

The novel is a great read and I loved it through and through. For those of you who are mystery buffs and enjoy historical fiction, this is a great choice. In this novel you will also hear about Coleridge, Wordsworth, Kant and Betham. It is a true romp in the past and calls up the time and place as though you were there.

AMAZON READER RATING: from 218 readers
PUBLISHER: Mulholland Books (May 7, 2013)
REVIEWER: Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: David Morrell
EXTRAS:
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Rambo Trilogy

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

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

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (NOV 8, 2011)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bibliography:

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

The Dark Tower Series

Originally written as Richard Bachman

Co-written with Peter Straub

Non-Fiction:

And the Movies created from his books:

]]> DISASTER WAS MY GOD by Bruce Duffy /2011/disaster-was-my-god-by-bruce-duffy/ Thu, 13 Oct 2011 13:02:16 +0000 /?p=21532 Book Quote:

“Newcomers are free to condemn their ancestors. We are at home and we have the time.” ~ Arthur Rimbaud

Book Review:

Review by Doug Bruns (OCT 13, 2011)

I was in my late thirties when the poet Arthur Rimbaud first crossed my horizon. It was Jim Harrison, the American writer, who brought him to my attention. In his memoir Off to the Side, Harrison writes, “I think that I was nineteen when Rimbaud’s ‘Everything we are taught is false’ became my modus operandi.” Harrison continues, “…Rimbaud’s defiance of society was vaguely criminal and at nineteen you try to determine what you are by what you are against.” I admire Harrison a great deal. If he liked Rimbaud, if Rimbaud was the man, then I needed to know more. I discovered that the poet had influenced a good bit of the music of the ‘60s and 1970s, that Morrison and Dylan and a host of others had cited his authority. Of this time, Patty Smith writes in her recent memoir, Just Kids: “’When I was sixteen, working in a non-union factory in a small South Jersey town,” she writes, “my salvation and respite from my dismal surroundings was a battered copy of Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations, which I kept in my back pocket.” His work, she concludes, “became the bible of my life.”

Further, I discovered that the term infant terrible was essentially coined to describe him and that, not only the writing, but the life lived was breathtaking.

I bought Rimbaud and dug in. But try as I might, he was lost on me. There was no fire there. The revolution was dead. I’d come too late to the poet. To Harrison’s point, to Patty’s point, Rimbaud was a young person’s game. To the mature reader, discovering him for the first time, his genius, well, it is obvious, particularly in the context of history; but he does not speak intimately to the older reader, does not influence to the degree of life changing, at least not to this reader. That the right book must find the reader at the right time, was never more true.

Louis Menand has written that a feature of modernity is that “the reproduction of custom is no longer understood to be one of the chief purposes of existence.” Like all ground-breaking endeavors, a visionary must come along and shatter tradition, setting a new standard and creating something that did not exist previously. In the modern tradition, the past is defined against the new, not incorporated into it. In the arts, in particular, the visionary becomes the genius-hero, an immortal. (“What you are, you are by accident of birth; what I am, I am by myself,” said Beethoven. “There are and will be a thousand princes; there is only one Beethoven.”) Though he did not touch me in a visceral way, Rimbaud nonetheless did not fail to impress. That the poet visionary-genius Rimbaud was a child prodigy, almost unheard of in literature, makes for good copy. (“He was,” writes Mr. Duffy, “that rarest of rarities and oddest of oddities–a prodigy of letters.”) That after producing his art and while still a young man, he renounced his genius and broke with society, fleeing to the African desert, some say running guns, seems a more likely creation of Hollywood than history. But it is history, and a rich history at that. That is the vein Mr. Duffy so deftly mines.

“I called to my executioners to let me bite the ends of their guns, as I died. I called to all plagues to stifle me with sand and blood.
Disaster was my god.”

Disaster was my God is a fictionalized biography of the poet Arthur Rimbaud’s life. The literature resulting from that early life is here too, not as exegesis, but rather as a compliment, an illuminating accent. In a note to the reader, Mr. Duffy explains his intent: “In a life as enigmatic and contradictory as Rimbaud’s, the more I considered the facts, and the many missing facts–and the more I studied his blazingly prescient writings and poems–the more I found it necessary to bend his life in order to see it, much as a prism bends light to release its hidden colors.” The poet’s life lends itself well to this technique. It is a vivid rainbow. Mr. Duffy’s technique succeeds wonderfully.

The outline of his life is nothing short of remarkable. Rimbaud created his ground-breaking art in a five year period, while in his late teens. (Victor Hugo called him “an infant Shakespeare.”) At age sixteen or seventeen, at perhaps the height of his powers, he left his village of Charleville, his middle-class upbringing, his sister and mother, and traveled to Paris, at the invitation of Symbolist poet Paul Verlaine. “Come, dear great soul,” wrote Verlaine. “We await you; we desire you.” The older Verlaine, married and a father, fell under the boy’s spell and the two began a torrid and public affair that scandalized Paris. (It is unclear whether Rimbaud was homosexual, or simply a provocateur–likely the latter.) Eventually the two separated, driving Verlaine to wit’s end, shooting Rimbaud. The young poet is slightly wounded and Verlaine consequently spent two years in prison.

Leaving Paris, Rimbaud began a life of adventure, traveling widely, giving up–even renouncing–his writing. He undertook the life of a businessman and explorer, ending up in sub-Saharan Africa. He was 24 when he settled in Harar, Ethiopia, working as a merchant. In 1891 he developed a problem in his leg which would ultimately force him out of the desert. He was carried across the desert on a gurney, his savings strapped to his chest in a special vest, shotgun at his side, surrounded by hired mercenaries. The leg was amputated in Marseille but the cancer soon spread and he died, in the company of his sister Isabelle, in Marseille at age 37.

“I say that one must be a seer, make oneself a seer. The poet makes himself a seer by a long, prodigious, and rational disordering of all the senses. Every form of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he consumes all the poisons in him, and keeps only their quintessences. This is an unspeakable torture during which he needs all his faith and superhuman strength, and during which he becomes the great patient, the great criminal, the great accursed – and the great learned one! – among men.”

Mr. Duffy has rich material here and he makes the most of it. He builds his narrative on the premise that Rimbaud and his mother Vitalie had a love-hate relationship, a dynamic that spurred in Rimbaud both his creative life and his peripatetic life. Indeed, the letters of Rimbaud to his mother include many suggestions that a great tension did exist. For instance, Rimbaud writes to his mother in December 1882 from Aden, Yemen: “I just sent you a list of books to send me here. Please don’t tell me to go to hell! I am about to reembark into the African continent for several years; and without these books, I will be without a heap of essential information. I will be like a blind man…” Subsequent letters find him pleading with his mother for supplies and support. Mr. Duffy’s premise is largely successful–”It was you, Mother,” he has Rimbaud’s sister say, “you who made him a foreigner in his own home.” The mother opens the book and ends it; she is the impetus, even the muse, of genius–though it is lost on her completely, in Mr. Duffy’s iteration.

Early on, Mr. Duffy asks, “…how a poet prodigy of almost unfathomable abilities could willfully forget how to write. How could such a man disable a style and unlearn ageless rhythms–stubbornly resist, as one might food and water, words and their phantom secrets…..in short, could a poet of genius systematically erase his own life–unwrite it? How? To what conceivable end?” It is a question that cannot be answered. The subject is gone, the analyst’s couch can never reveal the answer. This is where the novelist’s art comes in. Drawing on the life, the history, the writing and a good deal of imagination, Mr. Duffy fills in the gaps. He does it with much enthusiasm and verve. One gets the impression that he truly loves his subject, that he wants in a bad way to reveal a profound secret of this genius. But of course the secrets have all gone to the grave. Hence the art.

Late in the novel, Mr. Duffy puts these words into the mouth of Verlaine: “When Rimbaud was a child, or still a young man, he could believe in his dreams, could pretend, could be seduced by his own make believe. And remember, as Rimbaud saw it, and naive as this might sound, he had not been sent to earth merely to write poems but to change the world–quite literally. He actually thought that, he really did, and for while I suppose I did, too.” They say that a society has no culture until the poets show up. Rimbaud showed up and set culture on it’s ear, creating a new culture out of whole cloth. He did, indeed, change the world. He set a generation upon a new path–and does still. That is the job of the immortals.

“I want to be a poet, and I am working to make myself a seer; you will not understand this, and I don’t know how to explain it to you. It is a question of reaching the unknown by the derangement of all the senses. The sufferings are enormous, but one has to be strong, one has to be born a poet, and I know I am a poet…”

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-5from 5 readers
PUBLISHER: Doubleday (July 19, 2011)
REVIEWER: Doug Bruns
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Wikipedia page on  Bruce Duffy
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

Bibliography:

]]> THE CAT’S TABLE by Michael Ondaatje /2011/the-cats-table-by-michael-ondaatje/ Fri, 07 Oct 2011 14:00:11 +0000 /?p=21442 Book Quote:

“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: stars-4-5from 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:

Nonfiction:

Poetry:

Movies from books:

]]> BOXER, BEETLE by Ned Beauman /2011/boxer-beetle-by-ned-beauman/ Tue, 13 Sep 2011 12:56:54 +0000 /?p=19879 Book Quote:

“Normally you can’t get a proper look at your own conscience because it only ever comes out to gash you with its beak and you just want to do whatever you can to push it away; but put your conscience in the cage of this paradox, where it can slither and bark but it can’t hurt you, and you can study it for as long as you wish. Most people don’t truly know how they feel about the Holocaust because they’re worried that if they think about it too hard, they’ll find out they don’t feel sad enough about the 6 million dead, but I’m an expert in my own soul.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  SEP 13, 2011)

First-time author Ned Beauman really lays it out there in the first chapter of this extraordinary novel, which begins with an imaginary surprise birthday party thrown by Hitler for Joseph Goebbels in 1940. It is an exhilarating, outrageous opening to a book that will in fact take a quite different course. But it is important as a way of establishing the moral parameters (and this IS a moral book) and freeing up an imaginative space in which Beauman can explore some ideas that are normally unapproachable.

Actually, Beauman reminds me of nobody so much as Evelyn Waugh. He writes about the same period (England in the 1930s), he inhabits some of the same milieux (a house party in some noble pile), he shares or even tops Waugh in his outrageous use of absurd humor, and he writes about serious subjects at heart. His debut novel explores the world of British Fascism in the years before WWII. Despite the opening, the German Nazis never make an appearance other than as tutelary deities. In its place is a gaggle of mostly well-connected amateurs, a sort of lunatic fringe of the upper class, pursuing theories of eugenics and a universal world language. Yes, they had their real-life counterparts; Lord Claramore’s family is in the book, the Erskines, somewhat resembles the Mitfords; Evelyn Erskine, the daughter who shows her independence by becoming an atonal composer, is virtually identical to Elizabeth Lutyens; and Sir Oswald Mosley, the real-life leader of the British Union of Fascists, makes a cameo appearance, but his 1936 march of supremacy through the largely-Jewish London East End is shown as the farcical debacle it really was.

This period background is viewed from a modern frame. Kevin Broom, the narrator and a collector of Nazi memorabilia, gets caught up in a rivalry which leaves two other collectors dead and Kevin himself in danger of his life. The goal of the rivalry is not at first clear, but it turns upon a letter from Hitler to British scientist Philip Erskine thanking him for an unusual gift, and some as-yet-unspecified connection between Erskine and a diminutive London Jewish boxer named “Sinner” Roach.

Do not look to the story for any great plausibility, though. It propels the plot with exhilarating efficiency, but it is more in tune with the popular adventure stories of the earlier part of the century than with modern expectations of verisimilitude; Kevin’s role model, for instance, is Batman. Waugh used such devices also, but Beauman is very much of his own time in translating Waugh’s absurdity into shock or even disgust. Kevin, for instance, has trimethylaminuria, a genetic disease that makes his bodily secretions smell of rotting fish; there is also strong undercurrent of homosexual violence, which may turn some readers off the book.

Which would be a pity, because the best parts are very good indeed. I am thinking especially of a dinner conversation in New York involving Sinner, two Rabbis, and an American architect, showing how easily some humanitarian endeavors such as mid-century town planning may be perverted into crypto-fascism. Or a brilliant discursion on the quest for a universal language that would unite mankind, discussing real attempts such as Esperanto and Volapük together with the fictional Pangaean, invented by an Erskine ancestor. Or Philip Erskine’s own work with beetles, breeding them for extraordinary aggression and strength, an obvious parallel to the human Eugenics programs of the Nazis for the enhancement the Master Race — though the principle had earlier advocates in both Britain and America. This is a valuable and serious subject for a novelist (it is also examined in Simon Mawer’s excellent Mendel’s Dwarf), and though Beauman chooses an absurd and at times offensive vehicle in which to present it, his obvious intelligence and meticulous linking of his story to real events makes this a far better book than a mere summary might suggest.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-3-5from 39 readers
PUBLISHER: Bloomsbury USA (September 13, 2011)
REVIEWER: Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Ned Beauman blog  and website
EXTRAS: Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

Bibliography:

 

]]> THE TWELFTH ENCHANTMENT by David Liss /2011/the-twelfth-enchantment-by-david-liss/ Fri, 26 Aug 2011 13:47:23 +0000 /?p=20422 Book Quote:

“I know that changes are coming, and we must be ready to face them. Dark and terrible things, things such as what you saw with Lord Byron and at the mill, but those things are … minor disturbances, harbingers of beings much more dangerous.”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowsky  AUG 26, 2011)

The Twelfth Enchantment, by David Liss, starts off promisingly. It is the early nineteenth century and our heroine, Lucy Derrick, is a twenty-year-old orphan who is living unhappily in Nottingham, England, with her cruel uncle and an abusive woman named Mrs. Quince. Although she was well-educated by her late father, Lucy was left almost penniless when he died. She is at the mercy of her vicious uncle, Richard Lowell, who cannot wait to be rid of her. In fact, her uncle plans to give her hand in marriage to a thirty-five year old, dried up prune of a man named Olson, the owner of a local hosiery mill.

Although the Industrial Revolution has brought prosperity to some, this newfound wealth and efficiency has come at a high price. Smokestacks belch thick and toxic fumes that pollute the areas bordering the factories. In addition, manual laborers have been replaced by machinery, leading to high unemployment and abject poverty for those who can no longer feed their families. Furthermore, conditions in the factories are vile and unsafe; even the children who work the looms are beaten when they do not meet their overseer’s expectations.

Lucy’s existence is upended by a series of strange events involving Lord Byron (he shows up often in historical fiction these days), a roué named Mr. Morrison who tarnished Lucy’s reputation when she was just sixteen, an avuncular William Blake, and a mysterious and beautiful stranger, Mary Crawford, who introduces Lucy to a world of spells. It seems that Lucy has uncanny abilities that, if harnessed properly, would give her enormous power. She will need to master a huge amount of arcane knowledge and show tremendous courage, for she will find herself pitted against mighty and evil forces.

Meanwhile, Lucy must decide whether to fend off Byron’s not entirely unwelcome attentions (she admits that he is gorgeous to look at but a thorough reprobate). Lucy has a great deal on her plate: Whom can she really trust? Does she have the intellect and determination to use her unique talent effectively? Will she ever meet the love of her life?

By now, you may have deduced that Liss has overstuffed his narrative. There is a derivative quality to this novel that brings to mind familiar (and better) works, such as: Jane Eyre, who was cast off without a penny but stood up for herself as a proud, moral, and independent woman; Hard Times, in which Charles Dickens decries the forced labor of children and excoriates those who would enrich themselves on the backs of the poor; and the Harry Potter series, in which J. K. Rowling breathes life into magic and wizardry, while also dealing with feelings, relationships, and social issues. Liss often writes lush sentences, is a skilled descriptive writer, and he imbues Lucy with warmth and spirit. It is really too bad that, as the book progresses, the author resorts to clichés, contrivances, and silly twists and turns. The conclusion is flat and anticlimactic, when it should have been exciting and exhilarating. Much of The Twelfth Enchantment is captivating, but the weak conclusion may leave readers less than spellbound.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-3-5from 47 readers
PUBLISHER: Random House; First Edition edition (August 9, 2011)
REVIEWER: Eleanor Bukowsky
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: David Liss
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

See also:

Bibliography:

Benjamin Weaver thrillers:

Other Historical novels:

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