Author: Marsha

Station Eleven

By Emily St John Mandel

Published 2014

Read 2021

A book discussion group to which this reader belongs selected this book for the 2020-2021 reading season in March 2020 despite the book being advertised as one that deals with a world after a virus takes out most of civilization and while the US was starting to shut down due a virus that causes Covid-19.  The book discussion scheduled a year after the voting occurred will be an interesting one.  This reader anticipates several group members will require the same push into the book this reader did, but hopefully the group will engage with the book and listen to many themes it covers.

The structure of this book is quite well done:  The central, unifying character, a 51-year old actor named Arthur, dies nearly immediately as the book begins, during a scene in which he is playing King Lear.  The book moves back and forth in time across the various major characters, who are connected to Arthur in some way, giving their “before the virus” story and their “after the virus story”, and for some the “during the virus story.  We learn more about Arthur through these sections as well.  Fortunately the “during story” is only shared for the characters that don’t encounter terrible violence, which is not true for all the characters.  The major characters are various ages when the virus hits:  Kirsten (appearing in King Lear with Arthur) is eight; Miranda (Arthur’s first wife) and Jeevan (the audience member who tries to save Arthur’s life on stage) are in their mid/late 20’s; Clark (Arthur’s friend since college) is also 51.  So we see different kinds of impacts on the characters by the virus due to their age at the event.   Arthur dies before the virus hits.  A late section recalls his last day of life which reveals some of his evolution during a “normal lifetime”.  Each major character is associated with a separate sub-plot and a number of supporting characters associated with it.   There are also major connecting events that tie the characters and their stories together either before or after the virus hits.   The King Lear play ties together Arthur, Jeevan, Kirstin, and Miranda.  The dinner at Arthur and Miranda’s ties together Arthur, Miranda, Clark, and Elizabeth (Arthur’s second wife and a component of Clark’s post-virus story).  An interview by the editor of a Petoskey newspaper post-virus connects Kirsten, Clark, and Arthur.  And finally there are “things” to tie together the stories.  Miranda’s graphic novel “Station Eleven” connects Miranda with Kirsten, Arthur, Arthur’s son, and Clark.  The glass globe Clark gives Arthur and Miranda at the dinner party later shows up in Kirstin’s story.  Finally, Miranda’s dog connects her with Arthur’s son who plays a significant role this reader won’t describe here.

There are several major themes of the book.  “Survival is not enough” is a tag line for the Travelling Symphony to which Kristen belongs.  Literature, performing arts, and fine art are each important for several of the characters and drives home the importance of these in the vitality of any culture.  Purpose is essential for humanity.  Several of the characters find their purpose as some kind of artist but Jeevan and Clark show that purpose is essential for all of us.  Lack of purpose in a life leads to “ghost-walking” through life.  Clark eventually recognizes he has been ghost-walking and Jeevan knows it early on.

The author is from British Columbia, Canada.  She weaves some of her experience being on a small island there into her story—Arthur and Miranda are both from a small island off the coast of British Columbia which is the connection that brings them together initially—in Toronto.  Mandel sets the site of the King Lear play in Toronto so that is the place that Kirsten and Jeevan start their post-virus lives.  Clark is in transit to Toronto when his plane is forced to land in a town southwest of Lake Michigan.  The Travelling Symphony’s “territory” is along the shores of Lake Michigan and Lake Huron down to the fishing towns on the St Claire River.  As this reader grew up in Michigan, these locales were meaningful and connected this reader to the story in ways others readers might not be.

Of course this is also an “end of the world as we know it” book (and that song becomes an earworm for some of the characters at one point). The author draws out many themes through the various subplots including before/after a catastrophic event; remaining human and humane when survival is not a given; trying to flee the enemy/issue/plague and not always succeeding; the role of religion in society; true and false prophets, memory and remembering; and most importantly, the role of cooperation in making a viable, livable community in the face of chaos.   Her focus isn’t on how terrible things are but rather on how these characters are making life bearable for themselves and others, despite the dangers and uncertainties.  There is a clear glimmer of hope give near the end—Clark show Kirsten light coming from an area some distance from them.  It appears to be a grid of streets lit by electricity.

Although Mandel certainly wasn’t expecting a real pandemic to be the backdrop for many of her future readers, but it is now. It will likely invoke the experience of this reader who had to dip her toe into the book a little tentatively.   Jeevan tries to convince his girlfriend to take seriously this new Georgian flu and flee the city.  She doesn’t and reminds him that SARS came and left without much noise and this one likely will be similar.  But it’s not.  This Georgian flu is quite deadly.  Of course we can discuss whether Mandel’s flu could really spread quickly if it kills so efficiently and quickly but she’s not trying to educate about flu spread so we should just accept the premise.  We’re now living through a different kind of flu—Covid-19 that fortunately isn’t nearly as deadly but is certainly causing much terror throughout the world.  Are there things we should learn from this book as we face into the rest of the Covid-19 pandemic that likely will turn into endemic Covid-19 that lasts for the rest of our lifetimes?  Perhaps some lessons include keep some perspective on things, pay attention to those studying the disease, remember to retain your humanity, if your previous purpose has been disrupted, what can you do now to continue living with a purpose,  how do we create new communities that help us maintain our humanity and purpose, and how to do ensure the arts remain present to nurture our souls.

Someone

By Alice McDermott

Published 2013

Read Jan 2021

The beauty of McDermott’s books comes from her ability to provide us with a scene from a life.  It’s sparse but complete.  It’s tender but slightly sharp.  It tells the perception of the narrating character but manages to somehow convey the reality of the situation.

Such is the beauty of Someone, a series of scenes of the life of narrator Marie.  We encounter her first when she is a girl of seven.  She waits on the stoop of their Brooklyn house for her father who will be arriving home from his desk, not laborer, job.  Her brother Gabe is studying inside.  His friends are playing stickball in the street.  Her mother is preparing dinner.  We are treated to the arrival of her father, her jubilation from his presence, and their little rituals of greeting, pre- and post-dinner habits.  We learn a bit about the neighborhood and the neighbors, hear the names of characters who will turn up throughout Marie’s life, get a hint of her poor eyesight, and a hint as well of the serious nature of her big brother Gabe.

The various chapters begin somewhat chronologically but as the book progresses, they move back and forth a bit.  The story of her cataract surgery comes before the story of her wedding day.  A story of being in a nursing home precedes the story of the birth of her first child.  Each has been written in past tense and it’s a marvelous approach that the memories become unordered just as our own memories are even when we might try to start at the beginning.

Marie’s story is set in an Irish neighborhood in Brooklyn and we learn it’s evolving.  Marie’s mother wouldn’t consider leaving it so Gabe lives with her in that same apartment until she passes although Marie and her husband have moved to a house in the Bronx.  Gabe’s brother had been ordained a Catholic priest.  Why did he leave the priesthood and return to live with his mother?  We get a possible explanation late in the book but we also feel slightly guilty that it’s really none of our business.  Marie tells us some things but not others.  Maybe she knows answers and maybe she doesn’t.  She tells us what is important to her which is what matters.

The specifics of Marie’s life are shaped somewhat by the time and place in which she lives, but the phases of life she passes through are universal as are many of the feelings she does and doesn’t tell us. It’s certainly no surprise to this reader that Someone was a finalist for the National Book Award.  This reader looks forward to savoring more of her simultaneously understated and powerful books.

Miller’s Valley

By Anna Quindlen

Published 2016

Read Jan 2021

If you are looking for a book with somewhat flawed but engaging characters, realistic drama with no sermons, great but not syrupy language, a story that speaks to both your head and your heart, find a book by Anna Quindlen.  She does it again with Miller’s Valley.

This story is set in the 1970’s in a rural valley near a dam.  The feds want to extend the man-made lake into the valley but the farmers who live there don’t want to sell.  The farmers, like most small farmers then and now, can’t make a living just farming.  The narrator’s father is a fix-it man who can fix most anything.  The narrator’s mother married into the Miller family which has owned this farm for several generations.  She is actually the primary bread-winner via her nursing job at the local hospital.  Her sister lives in a small house at the back of the property and hasn’t come out doors for as long as narrator Mimi can remember, event when the valley floods during big rainstorms.

Our narrator is the youngest child of three.  Mimi’s oldest brother Ed is fifteen or so years older and is in college studying engineering by the time Mimi’s narration begins.  Her popular and good-looking brother Tommy manages to graduate from high school somehow and enlists in the Marines. He returns from Vietnam physically intact but certainly changed in ways that keep him emotionally separated from the family.   This is especially difficult for Mimi’s mother as Tommy is clearly her favorite child.  Mimi quietly observes her family and seeks to stay under the radar but her academic capabilities are recognized by her teachers who provide her direction to “go beyond”, direction that Mimi’s mother and brother Tommy also echo.

Quinlen does a remarkable job telling the story of this family and giving a sense of the change that is impending for these family farmers and their town and for other small communities as young people leave for college and don’t always return.    This reader grew up in the same time period as Mimi and is impressed by the author’s talent in capturing the flavor of the time and at the same time making the story quite timeless.  This reader looks forward to reading more of this author’s work.

A Gentleman in Moscow

By Amor Towles

Published 2016

Read  April  2020;  Jan 2021

This reader listened to this book in the early days of the Covid-19 Pandemic shutdown  and read the written text of this book in Jan 2021, during the phase of the pandemic in which the vaccine is becoming available to tackle said pandemic.  This reader savored the book each time and in both formats.

Towles presents us with Count Alexander Rostov, recipient of the Order of Saint Andrew, member of the Jockey Club, and Master of the Hunt, as he is appearing before a committee of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs in 1922.  He stands accused of becoming an anti-Revolutionary and threat to the current government. This would usually result in being sent to a firing squad.  However Rostov admits authorship of the poem “Where Is It Now”, written in 1913, has been attributed to him. This poem is considered by the committee as a call to action and puts him in the category of heroes of the prerevolutionary cause.  Thus he is spared the firing squad and sentenced to house-arrest in the hotel in which he resides, the Hotel Metropol, a grand hotel in the center of Moscow.  Thus begins our adventure with the Count as he begins his sentence living in the hotel, not in the spacious and pleasant suite he has called home for the last four years, but in a tiny attic room.

The reader follows the Count over thirty-two years of his sentence of house arrest.  He enters his sentence at age thirty-three having had no occupation as it is “not the business of gentlemen to have occupations.” He eventually confronts the fact that this sentence, a sort of forced retirement from his non-occupation of a gentleman who has many interactions with the world external to the Metropol,  is becoming quite tedious and meaningless.  We follow him as he finds purpose to his life in the form of an occupation as head waiter of the elegant hotel restaurant and as a friend to workers and several special guests of the Metropol.  We also follow changes in the politics and culture of the new State as the Metropol’s ballroom holds many organizing assemblies, conferences, and other meetings of the evolving government.   We watch as the Count’s occupation and talents lead him to connections to some officials in the Soviet and American governments that prove useful to them, and perhaps him.  A major event happens to the Count near the middle of the book and a new purpose is thrust upon him, caring for the child of a former resident of the hotel when he had first started his house arrest and when she was a spunky nine-year-old.

The book is not short—it takes Towles 452 pages to cover thirty-two years of a man’s life who has much time to consider what is happening to him and his homeland and how he is reacting and will react to it.  Towles uses several footnotes to expand on specific items, giving the reader the feeling of being “let in” on something of importance.  Most of the time the book is focused on the Count’s activities and thoughts, but occasionally Towles focuses briefly on the activities and thoughts of other characters, generally to forward specific parts of the plot involving them in an efficient and effective manner.

The Count’s self-reflections and realizations of how his sentence has impacted him and how the new State is impacting his homeland in general and his close friends in particular are quite well done.  In the end, however, the book is much more about the evolution of relationships between the Count and the various characters—hotel employees and hotel guests—and the importance of friendship and purpose in a life well lived.   Towles approach to the book’s structure, the language he uses, and the warm and sometimes humorous scenes he chooses to include and the darker and violent scenes that he doesn’t include, but we know happen, make this book a very pleasant and well done read.

The Vanishing Half

By Brit Bennett

Published 2020

Read Dec 2020

Desiree and Stella Vignes are twins born in 1938 in a town called Mallard, LA.  Although  Mallard isn’t officially at town in government terms, the town certainly existed in the mind of its residents.  It was founded in 1848 by their great-great-great-grandfather Alphonse Decuir who was the son of the white man who owned the sugarcane fields he inherited and the black woman that white man owned.  He was light-skinned.  His children were also light, their mother also being a mulatto.  He created a town for “men like him”:  those who would never be accepted as white but refused to be treated like Negroes.  By 1938 when the twins were born, the town was populated by fair skinned people, some blond, some red-head, most with wavy hair. 

Desiree and Stella run away to New Orleans in 1954.  Desiree wanted to escape the smallness of the town and especially its obsession with lightness.  Stella had planned to become a math teacher at Mallard High.  Her dreams ended when their mother told them they wouldn’t return to high school in the fall after they finished tenth grade.  Their mother cleaned white ladies’ houses in the next town and needed them to contribute to her small income.  Her husband had been dragged from the house one night when the twins were young and killed. After working the summer cleaning white people’s houses the girls left for New Orleans after the annual Founder’s Day picnic and made their way into the rest of the world.

The book starts in 1968 when Desiree returns to Mallard with her “blue-black” daughter Jude, fleeing an abusive husband.  Although she intended to stay in Mallard only for a short time, Jude was enrolled in and graduated from Mallard schools.   By then Stella had gone her own way which was unknown to Desiree except that she thought she had “passed over” as white when she moved.  We eventually learn that Stella had married her (white) boss (she had been his secretary), a successful businessman,  and they had a daughter, Kennedy. 

The first few book sections alternate between Desiree’s story, told in the present of 1968 and as she recalls her past, and Jude’s story in 1978 in California where she had accepted a track scholarship at UCLA.  Eventually the story moves forward as the twins’ lives slowly converge as their daughters become aware of each other and Kennedy becomes aware of her mother’s past.

The author is generally quite graceful in presenting the conflicts in the lives of each twin and their daughters.  Stella’s life filled with endless fear of being discovered and the weight of her lies to her husband and daughter.  Jude befriends a group of people who are also hiding their true sexual identities and are actively living simultaneously in two worlds.    Kennedy is portrayed as a spoiled brat of wealthy parents—indulgent father and cold and closed-off mother.  Her path is complicated by her own lack of sufficient talent to “make it” in Hollywood/theater and by meeting Jude who says something to her in spite during a falling out they have. She eventually has her own  lies to hide.  Jude hides her knowledge of Stella’s current life to her mother as well as the reason she and her boyfriend haven’t married.

Although a focus of the book may be on the lies we tell to protect ourselves and those we love, that really isn’t the full picture.  The question of the importance of race in determining how we relate to a person is the real heart of the matter.  The twins’ father is murdered in the early 40’s.  We know things like that happened.  Stella’s upper class white neighborhood is “invaded” by a black TV star and his family in the late 1960s and they are persecuted with violent acts until they leave.  We know things like that happened.  The author partially shifts the focus of hidden identity in the 1980s to sexual identity to give us another example of prejudice in action. Jude’s mother is fine with her boyfriend being white; she just wants them to get married and provide her grandkids (and doesn’t know why she’s not getting them anytime soon).  Stella says her complaint with Kennedy’s black boyfriend wasn’t his color but his pompous attitude driven by his education.  The author leaves us with a scene of a black girl and her white transgender boyfriend hand in hand enjoying a swim in the “black” part of the local river.  But what about now.  Have we really become color blind?  Does it matter if you have “black blood”—does that make you “black” and you must lie to say you are white if you choose to “pass”.  This question remains unanswered by the author but one I anticipate she hopes we will seriously ponder and recognize and that we can own what we actually believe ourselves and decide whether it should change.

Dear Edward

By Ann Napolitano

Published 2020

Read Dec 2020

Twelve year old Eddie Adler and his family—parents Bruce and Jane, fifteen year old brother Jordan—board a flight leaving Newark airport for LA.  They are moving from New York City to Los Angeles; their possessions are on a truck and will meet them there.  Unfortunately they don’t make it.  The flight goes down in Colorado and 191 souls are lost.  The only survivor is Eddie. 

Chapters alternate between the day of the flight and Edward’s story after. (Eddie’s Aunt Lacey, Jane’s sister who, with her husband, take Eddie in after the crash, decides that the press should refer to Eddie by his given name, Edward.  That name sticks for him.)   The pace of both parts of the stories is rapid but not hurried.  We get to know Eddie’s family members as well as some of the other passengers as they fly across the country.  We get to know Edward’s aunt and uncle as they struggle to support Edward deal with his trauma and work their way through  their own sadness regarding multiple miscarriages.  Edward’s journey towards a new normal for him rolls out slowly and compassionately. 

This reader devoured this book.  Alternating focus on the flight and Edward’s story both compelled the reader forward but also gave the reader a needed break from each story.  Knowing the crash is coming for these passengers whose hopes and dreams we are learning is difficult.  Relief from Edward’s pain and suffering and the struggles of his aunt and uncle is also welcomed.  But neither story feels neither heavy -handed nor overwrought—hence the desire to keep reading and participating in these multiple stories.

Well done Ann Napolitano!

Unquiet:  A Novel

By Linn Ullmann

Translated from Norwegian:  Thilo Reinhard

Published 2018

Read Oct 2020

This reader listened to an audio version of the book which allowed her to be unaware that Linn Ullmann is the daughter of Liv Ullmann and Ingmar Bergman.  This reader has since learned that the book, while called a novel, does, at least in part, reflect actual events.  Frankly if the book had been called a memoir and/or the true parental situation of the author was part of the marketing of the audiobook, this reader likely would have not chosen to read it.  But absent that distraction, this reader did choose to read the book and greatly enjoyed it.  Although this reader is generally aware of the celebrated works of the authors’ parents, this reader is just young enough and just uncool enough to have none of their films.  So this reader won’t discuss the real parents any further.

The narrator tells us fairly early in the book that she and her father, a famous Swedish filmmaker, had planned to write a book about him.  They had spent two years discussing the project and planned that they would take a jeep tour when they were done (her father loved driving his jeep).  Unfortunately by the time the tape recorder was purchased and the recordings began, the father’s health had failed substantially and only a few recordings were made.  So the narrator instead provides us with her thoughts about her life—focusing only on her childhood, the time during which the recordings were made, and after his death.

The narrator was the “love child” of a famous Swedish filmmaker and a Norwegian actress. She never names them, which suited this reader, and refers to them by “the father” or “papa” etc.  She was the youngest of his nine children born of 5 mothers.  The filmmaker was married to four of these women but he and her mother never married.  So there was never “the three of them” that she remembered but rather only she and her mother and she and her father. 

She tells of the summers spent with her father and his last wife on his property on an island off the coast of Sweden.  The property had a number of buildings including the narrow house he progressively expanded over the years and a barn that was converted to a movie theater.  She tells of times with her mother including when they were in the United States in a rented yellow house outside of New York City chosen because it had trees and children should be raised with trees.

She tells of the sessions she records on a small recorder but never listened to until after her father’s death so she didn’t realize how poor the sound quality was  despite being told this was the best device for the job.  The dialog between father and daughter is quite sad as it shows the rapid decline of his mental and physical capabilities which contrasts with his robustness when she was a child. 

Absent the knowledge of the true identity of the characters of the book, this book told a story of a girl born of a father 48 years her senior and a younger (by 20 years) mother.  This reader developed a sense that the narrator generally felt distant from both of her parents.  She desperately wanted more connection with her father, a desire that lasted throughout her life.  It seems she had more connection with her father than any of his other children but this connection was still very much on his terms and didn’t seem to take into consideration any needs of hers, perhaps due to expectations of fathers in the timeframe of the story (1960’s), his age, and his focus on his own interests and career .  The mother/daughter relationship seems somewhat universal in many ways:  daughter is annoyed by mother; mother has distinct ideas about what children need  (in this case trees and milk); mother is inconsistent in dealing with her daughter; and likely neither ever understands nor connects fully with the other.  The author moves seemingly randomly through time with her various memories which suited this reader well.  It felt like our own memories which pick varying times when we choose to start remembering. 

The writing was quite engaging.  Descriptions of the wind-swept island, her father driving his jeep fast to make the ferry to buy his papers on the mainland, the drying house where she hid when a young girl—all are quite vivid. 

Forget that the characters are real people and enjoy the beauty of the writing, the way the author reels out memories of a childhood, and the approach she takes to show the realities adult children face when parents’ lives are coming to a close.