Category: Modern Fiction

Nora Webster

By Colm Toibin

Published 2014

Read Feb 2018

This is a book about nearly nothing.  There is no major drama, no significant reckoning, no birth nor death happens during the course of the story.  It’s about nothing except a 44 year old woman who lost her husband of 20 years through a painful but not wholly revealed disease and who now has to figure out how to preserve her private self in a very small town where everyone knows much (too) about everyone else.  Her two daughters are in college and boarding school, both paid for by their aunt and uncle.  Her two sons, approximately 9 and 12, have returned home after spending several months with their widowed aunt while their mother focused on her dying husband.

Nora resents the smallness of the village.   She looks forward to the time when the residents stop coming by to offer her comfort for her loss.  She really just wants to be left alone.  She even considers leaving but economics don’t favor it  She’s challenged by needing to find employment as the Widow’s Pension is very small and she and her teacher husband had no savings.  She abruptly sells their summer cottage without consulting with or regard for any of her family to create some cash flow, and perhaps to seal off that part of their life, to a neighbor’s relative who now lives abroad but always wanted a coastal cottage.  Nora succumbs to a stern local nun’s urging to seek employment with her former employer, the rich factory owner in the small town.  She dreads returning to work there as her boss will be someone with whom she was a co-worker 20 years ago (whom she offended then and never liked) and because it will be returning to an existence that she had so happily escaped when she married Maurice.  She mourns her husband—his ability to engage in lively conversations while she enjoyed being in the background of those social engagements, and his deep love for being with her.  She also mourns that gone will be the freedom she had as a homemaker to define how she spent her day.

Our current views of parenthood can lead us to think she is not a very good parent.  She decides the boys can manage on their own after school for a few hours before she escapes the office at the factory.  When she had left the boys in the care of her aunt while she tended her sick husband, she never interacted with them at all during these months.  The older boy returned with a stutter and the younger boy started bed wetting but she has little demonstrated concern, expecting that these things will work themselves out.  She realizes she knows little of what they think or feel but makes no real effort to change this. She does however clearly care about them.  She takes them out of school for a day to go to Dublin where they can see their sister among other adventures.  She fights strongly for the younger boy to be returned to the “A” classroom when he’s moved to the “B” classroom.  She allows them to stay up late to watch movies with her—Gaslight and Lost Horizon—although she realizes evenutlaly that they could be disturbing to them.

We start having some sense of the time of the novel when Nora’s Widows Pension is increased and her sister becomes politically involved in what became known as The Troubles.  My quest for understanding more about the context of the novel led me to do a limited amount of research about Irish politics which helped establish the timing of the novel in the late 1960’s.  Knowing the timing helped reset my view of Nora’s world a bit.   I no longer expected Maurice to be treated with potent pain killers.  I no longer expected Nora to be anything close to a “helicopter” mother.  I had more compassion for Nora’s sorrow at having to return to a workplace where women workers were single—either before they married, were unmarriageable for some reason, or like herself, forced back into the workplace due to widowhood.  I developed much more compassion for Nora’s struggles in trying to find some kind of bearable life in the face of being a widow of limited means and while being an intensely private person, not understood well by her family nor understanding of her family members either. The good news for Nora is that she achieves a bit beyond that.  She creates a space to enjoy in her home and she fills it with music she is discovering with the help of others.

Apparently Toibin’s mother was widowed when he was about 12 and he grew up in a home where there was a “great deal of silence”.  Nora Webster may be somewhat modelled upon his mother and the stammering son upon him.  If this is the case I find the novel even more interesting.  He provides an extraordinarily non-judgmental view of Nora Webster.  She is cool but not icy or abusive.  She is appropriately frugal but generous when it matters for her children or herself.  She has strength but she’s only slowly discovering that to be the case.  She is an extremely private person and generally closed off to others, but she’s slowly discovering that she can choose to have connections with people beyond Maurice and it might be worth the effort.  She’s pragmatic about her situation and she is finding a way to make that situation an interesting one for herself.    While Nora Webster is not a character for whom you readily feel any warmth, when the novel ended I continued thinking about her and eventually decided that the feeling I have for her is respect.

American War:  A Novel

by Omar El Akkad

Published 2017

Read March 2017

This is a remarkable book.  I am having great difficulty separating myself from it to return it to the library although I most certainly want others to read it and be impacted by it as well.  This, however, is not a pleasant nor easy book.  It is frankly disturbing on a number of levels.  On one level, the story of the Chestnuts of Louisiana could become a successful 2 hour movie but if it is actually filmed, I hope it is in a long series so that the viewer can experience what the reader will experience—the other levels that Akkad explores in an engaging and powerful way that will leave you unsettled and, hopefully, thinking.

The book starts with a Prologue, written by an unidentified narrator who indicates he was born in Georgia but was transplanted to Alaska as a child and has spent his professional life as an academic.  He has studied many historical documents and has published about the Second American Civil War, including an account of the “infamous events of Reunification Day, when one of the South’s last remaining rebels managed to sneak into the Union capital and unleash the sickness that cast the country into a decade of death.  It is estimated that eleven million people died in the war, and almost ten times that number in the in the plague that followed.”  The narrator indicates he is now dying from cancer and is taking this time to “say what needs to be said”.  He refers to a mysterious “she” who he still loves.  He reveals the story he will provide isn’t about war, but rather about ruin.

Akkad tells the story of Sarat Chestnut in four sections:  Part I April 2075 in Louisiana; Part II July 2081 Iuka, Mississippi; Part III October, 2086 Lincolnton, GA; Part IV 2095 Lincolnton, GA.  Interspersed between and within these sections Akkad provides excerpts from various historical documents, books, and speeches that the narrator has used in his research.  These provide various kinds of views about the history of the war and the people who drove it.  They provide an interesting sort of context for Sarat’s story.  Sections I-III are told through a narrator in third person.     Section IV is told in first person by the narrator we met in the Prologue, as he is in this section but not the earlier ones.

We meet Sarat when she is 6 in April 2075, about 18 months after the assignation of the President of the United States of America by a suicide bomber, now a famous martyr, and about 6 months after the Declaration of Independence by the MAG (Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama), fueled in part by opposition to a law banning the use of fossil fuels.  We also learn that by 2075, climate and political forces discussed in 2018 have had substantial impact by 2075.  The geography of the United States has been vastly altered including the coasts having been substantially reduced (including the complete loss of Florida) driving immigrants from the coasts to the center of the country and the requiring relocation of the US capital from Washington, DC to Columbus, Ohio.  The scorched and parched southwest, including much of Texas, has been given over to Mexico.  Civil and inter-country wars in the Middle East have given way to a new Bouazzi Empire which, in conjunction with China, is sending aid to the MAG.   South Carolina isn’t part of the MAG primarily because a biological agent unleashed on it earlier has resulted in the need for a wall to keep it forever quarantined from the rest of the country.   In the opening chapters, Sarat loses her father as collateral damage in a guerrilla attack as he is seeking a work permit to go north and secure employment that will allow him to take his family north to a better life than they currently have.  The Chestnut family and their neighbors feel substantial pressure to leave the area as fighting just west of them is expected to envelop them soon.  The Chestnut family is allowed, although they are in a “blue/purple state” , and for substantial cost, to go to a refugee camp on the border of Mississippi and Tennessee.

In the subsequent sections we learn about Sarat at various time points in her life:  as a refugee in the camp that was the destination at the end of Section I, as a product of radicalization/recruitment by Albert Gaines, as a detainee following arrest for actions she undertakes for the war effort, and after release from this detention camp.  I won’t give away further aspects of the plot.

While reading the book, I pondered what life was like for other people in the United States and in the MAG at that time.  Since the book focuses on Sarat, we are limited in our understanding of these questions to what Sarat personally experiences.  This is an interesting aspect of the book.  As I write there are presently people who were born in a refugee camp, or fled one with their family at a very young age, and who are growing up in a refugee camp and have little or no idea of what life is like for anyone not in a refugee camp.  They have limited or filtered information about those on either side of the conflict that has driven them to be in the refugee camp and have unclear prospects for where or how they might live in the future.

I became aware that this book provokes the realization that our understanding of what war is really like for those living in the presence of war, whether in a refugee camp, in the cross-fire of the front, or in a rubble left after the fighting has moved on, is close to non-existent.

But the author provokes even more—why do we fight in wars?  Gaines tells Sarat “I sided with the Red because when a Southern tells you what they’re fighting for—be it tradition, pride, or just mule-headed stubbornness—can’t call it a lie.  When a Northerner tells you what they’re fighting for, they’ll use words like democracy and freedom and equality and the whole time both you and they know that the meaning of those words changes by the day, changes like the weather.  I’d had enough of all that.  You pick up a gun and fight for something, you best never change your mind.  Right or wrong, you own your cause and you never, ever change your mind.”  I was confronted by the reason Sarat’s driver, working for a coordinator of a group of Southern rebel groups, had for joining:  “I just wanted to be something.”  His desperation for meaning in his life is haunting, especially since he didn’t have much interest in the “cause” at all.  I wondered how many “recruits” have joined rebel groups, “terrorist” groups, or even the “official” military for this reason (whether living in a refugee camp, in an occupied territory, or even in “regular society”).  Sarat’s reason for her actions evolves over time and eventually echoes a reason for continuous conflict over the eons of human existence:  vengeance for wrong done to one’s family by others.

The author continues to keep us uncomfortable throughout the book.   Sarat’s story is very difficult to read at times.  We are reading about the United States of America being in the state of civil war—a situation that currently only happens “over there”.   But most of all, the author effectively holds a mirror up to the USA regarding the role it’s played in civil wars elsewhere.

Read this book to be uncomfortable.  Read this book to begin to confront what you know and think about war.  Read this book to begin to comprehend the drivers for desperate acts we brand “terrorist”.   Read this book and pass it on to others and talk about it and how it makes us feel.

 

All the Light We Cannot See

By Anthony Doerr

Published 2014

Read Jan 2018

This wildly successful book (100 weeks on the NY Times Bestseller List, Pulitzer Prize) is a somewhat puzzling book, evoking a range of disparate reactions from readers and reviewers.  I was compelled to read the book as part of my book club’s 2017-2018 season.  We waited for the clamor for the library copies to die down a bit and then launched into it.

The author provides three primary characters:  Marie-Laure LeBlanc, the only daughter of the widowed keeper of keys at the Museum of Natural History in Paris and who goes blind at age six; Werner Pfenning, an orphan who lives with his sister, Jutta, at an orphanage in Germany and exhibits great aptitude for engineering and building and repairing radios;  Von Rumpel, a German officer assigned to seek and obtain French treasures for the Reich.   The stories remain generally distinct until late in the novel.

The author tells the parallel stories of two children growing up in very different homes in very different circumstances.

Marie-Laure is well loved and protected by her widowed father and a frequent and charming figure at the museum demonstrating great appreciation for the natural science on display at the museum.  Her father provides her Braille versions of books including Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Beneath the Sea which stimulates her curiosity of the sea. He also makes a miniature version of the neighborhood to teach her how to navigate her surroundings.  Once Paris’s invasion is certain, Marie-Laure’s father is asked to transport a diamond of great value, The Sea of Flames, or one of three fakes made of it (he doesn’t know which he has).  The destination of father and daughter is in flames when they arrive so they are forced to continue to his brother’s home in St Malo on the sea.  The father builds another miniature of their new neighborhood for his daughter and is then summoned back to the museum.  Unfortunately he is arrested and never returns, although the pair somehow exchanges a few letters over time. Marie-Laure draws her uncle out of his shell a bit (he’s still suffering from shell-shock from the Great War) and enjoys a warm relationship with the housekeeper.

Werner and his sister are housed at an orphanage.  They find a broken wireless set which Werner repairs and they secretly listen to broadcasts at night including one from a French professor who discusses science.   Unfortunately Werner faces a life in the mines once he grows up so he jumps at the opportunity to compete for a place at the National Polital Institutes of Education in Essen.  He wins a spot and takes it despite his sister’s objections.  He attends the school and withstands the physical and emotional ordeal of the education, including the wounding of his friend, Frederick, after he refuses to participate in a brutal tradition.  At age 16 he is told that he is now 18 and begins conscription — seeking radio transmissions by enemy supporters starting in Russia.

Marie-Laure’s housekeeper forms a resistance effort and her uncle agrees to transmit information using his radio in the attic.  Thus the connection between Marie-Laure and Werner is made—-Werner discovers the transmissions and recognizes The Professor from his youth.  Von Rumpel’s story focuses on his attempt to find the Sea of Fire diamond.  The three stories eventually collide as St Malo is bombed in Aug 1944.

The author chooses a short to very-short chapter approach to keep us turning the pages to learn what happens next to the primary characters.  The short chapter approach is generally effective.  By usually revolving amongst the main characters and delivering short bursts of information, the author creates and seeks to maintain our engagement to see the story through.  The lush language sometimes got in the way for this reader who sometimes found the book dragging on a bit. The author also chooses a flash-forward, flash-back format to tell the story.   This choice is tolerable but not necessarily needed except that the form is perhaps expected in a novel written today.

The characters are variably engaging for this reader.  Werner’s story, aside from the precociousness of his sisters’ warning, is very compelling.  Werner’s expected fate is working in the mines which he truly wants to avoid; the special school seems his only route to education and stimulation of his engineering brain.  While he does learn and is put to work using his special talents, he, along with all of the other boys, suffers from a brutalization of the soul and the horrors of the German Reich as part (focus?) of their education. The character feels very real, genuinely engages, and for whom this reader feels much compassion.  The general demise of health and heart Werner experiences as he does his job to track down transmissions of the Resistance is well drawn and very believable as is his basically criminal reaction to the transmission he discovers in St Malo (which he doesn’t report).  We see his mind and body broken and cheer his small resistance and hope he can survive.

Von Rumpel is on a relentless mission to find the diamond for the glory of the Reich and which he hopes will somehow safe him from the cancer that is eating his body.  The device of the exotic diamond seemed a bit strained—was it really needed?  I would have been more engaged with Marie-Laure’s father carrying a valuable document to further then Resistance and Von Rumpel seeking to find that document.     Perhaps this device is to show that wars include those driven more by greed than policy.

This reader found the character of Marie-Laure to be the flattest.  She is blind but is beloved and cared for and seems to be in a bubble separate from the rest of reality.  The reason the author chose to make the character blind is not clear to me.  A non-blind 16-year old girl would have also been in distress at the climax and the interactions between her and Werner likely similar. While there would be no need for the miniature neighborhood to teach her bearings, the relationship with the father could have been as strong and a puzzle hiding place for the diamond still a possibility.

I understand the appeal of this book.  Despite my criticisms I agree it is a good book that highlights the kind of destruction that war can bring to property, body, and soul.

Exit West

By Mohsin Hamid

Published 2017

Read Jan 2018

Hamid’s use of language is remarkable.  He catches your breath nearly immediately: “It might seem odd that in cities teetering at the edge of the abyss young people still go to class….but that is the way of things, with cities as with life, for one moment we are pottering about our errands as usual and the next we are dying, and our eternally impending ending does not put a stop to our transient beginnings and middles until the instant when it does.” His language is deceptively simple but charged with much food for thought.  In Chapter 1 we meet Saeed and Nadia, two young people in an unnamed city, as they meet and begin a relationship as their city is about to fall apart completely and the lives of all its inhabitants forever changed.

Saeed and Nadia are likely both Muslim, but only Saeed regularly prays.  Nadia does, however, wear a concealing long black robe.  When asked why, she responds “So men don’t fuck with me.”  We learn Nadia has left her family’s home and lives alone in a small apartment which she ferociously loves.  The robe helps her maintain a distance from others that is important to enabling her to live the life she wants.  Saeed lives with his parents.  His father takes his prayers fairly seriously and honored his son’s request to attend prayers with the other men at a fairly young age.  Saeed’s mother prays some but not with the same devotion as her husband. Saeed’s religion likely was a driver for his decision not to have sex with Nadia until they were married, surprising and somewhat annoying Nadia, although she accepted his position.  They found ways to be intimate within that constraint and as the city continues to fill with refugees and become less safe for all.

In short time, the war intensifies, internet and cell phone connectivity are cut off, and Saeed’s mother is killed by a stray bullet.  Nadia stays at Saeed’s house the night of the funeral, to offer comfort and help, but never returns to her own apartment.  The young people begin investigating “the doors” they are hearing about and arrange passage for the three of them—Nadia, Saeed, and his father.  They hope their down payment isn’t just a scam.  When it’s clear they will be leaving, Saeed’s father refuses to go saying “Your mother is here.” With great discomfort Saeed agrees to leave without him.  Saeed’s father requests Nadia see Saeed through to safety and indicates he hopes that one day she will be the mother of his grandchildren.

We expect the next part of the novel to be the story of their struggle through various places on their way to someplace like Sweden.  It begins that way.  Saeed and Nadia are first in Mykonos and we experience their dislocation and struggle to find food and other essentials while their savings dwindle.

But the next “door” for which they pay passage drops them into a bedroom in a mansion in Kensington Gardens section of London.  Many of the currently un- or under-occupied mansions in the area (second or third homes for their owners) have doorways that have somehow opened up to thousands of immigrants.  New challenges abound for the “natives” vs “immigrants”.

With a stroke of the pen, Moshin Hamid creates a new set of questions about immigration and some new possibilities.

What if immigrants can cross boundaries through a simple “door”.  How do you protect your property?  How do you make the immigrants leave? Will you kill them if necessary?

While Saeed and Nadia are in London, electricity and water are shut off to the “immigrant community” in the toney Kennigston Garden section in an attempt to drive them out of rooms in which they “squat”.  War between the groups is poised to occur.  Saeed and Nadia realize they’ve left one war-torn city for another city about to become completely war-torn as well.  Fortunately that doesn’t happen: “Perhaps they had grasped that the doors could not be closed, and new doors would continue to open, and they had understood that the denial of coexistence would have required one party to cease to exist, and the extinguishing party too would have been transformed in the process, and too many native parents would not after have been able to look their children in the eye, to speak with head held high of what their generation had done.  Or perhaps the sheer number of places where there were now doors had made it useless to fight in any one.”

So Hamid opens more questions:  What if the Atlantic and Pacific oceans don’t protect the USA from throngs of immigrants crowding through doors they hear about.  What if a wall isn’t enough to stop them?  What if you can’t stop them coming?

How do you allocate food?  How do you provide work?  How do you create basic infrastructure to provide water, sewers, and light to thousands of new people willing to work for their keep and simply seeking a better life than the one they’ve left behind.

Nadia and Saeed end up in Marin, CA.  They have a shanty with a corrugated metal roof and discarded packing crate sides.  They acquire a solar panel and battery set with a universal outlet and with the strong wireless signal everywhere they have connection needed in the modern world.  There were few natives in Marin, CA but then the concept of “nativeness” turns out to be relative as many others considered themselves to be native (although they clearly were descended from immigrants).

And why were people migrating in such vast numbers?  The reasons are likely due to calamity created by mankind:  war, famine due to climate change, war, rising waters flooding islands and coastline, war, war, war.  So many on the move for many reasons, with limited likelihood they would return “home”.

And who do you try to connect with when you are among the immigrants—people like you?  In what respect?  Color? Language? Religion? What matters now?

Hamid’s short novel (229 pages) fills the reader with these questions and many more.  He doesn’t provide us with answers but he did leave this reader with a sense of hope.  He provides Saeed and Nadia a graceful end to their relationship.  He shows us the building of communities by and for new settlers to areas once “owned” by the “natives”.  He shows us the city Saeed and Nadia left rebuilt and filled with young people that know only of the war they experienced through their history lessons.  He shows us things will continue but they will never be the same and that’s OK.    Once we’re OK with it.

Miss Jane

By Brad Watson

Published 2016

Read Dec 2017

For the first time in my life I knowingly have an overdue library book—this one.  I can’t renew it because it’s on-hold for other book discussion members.  But I really don’t want to give it up.  Enough said about this book?  Well I’ll say it anyway.

I’m not sure what I like most about this book—Miss Jane or the author’s beautiful language.

Miss Jane was conceived in 1915 in rural Mississippi when her father had been drinking heavily (his own moonshine which would be a stable source of income through thick and thin times) and her mother, then 39, was heavily sedated by laudanum which she took, on doctor’s direction only when her nerves were most frayed.  She was born with a genital defect that rendered her incontinent and without means for sexual intercourse, but was otherwise normal physically and mentally.

Miss Jane’s childhood is a mixture of delight and pain.  Her various senses of sight, smell, and touch were regularly delighted through the physicality of living on a farm containing sharecropped fields, forests, streams, and animals.  Miss Jane desperately wanted to attend school when she reached school age, but the guidance from Dr. Thompson, the doctor who delivered her , monitored her health, and corresponded regularly with distant experts regarding her condition (always hoping their surgical techniques would advance sufficiently to help Miss Jane) regarding limiting food and drink were insufficient.  Although the uncontrollable accidents were actually few, the hunger and thirst associated with avoiding food and fluids to prevent the accidents left her too lightheaded to function in the classroom.  Lack of formal education didn’t deter her from learning to read and write and do arithmetic.  She was self-taught; arithmetic  knowledge came from watching her father tend his small store set up to help his sharecroppers obtain needed supplies.  She eventually ran the store herself while just a child using a step stool to reach the counter and shelves; store revenue soars since it was open much more of the time as a result.

Grace, her older sister, was charged with tending Miss Jane from birth until Grace successfully moves away from home into town as a late teen.  Both girls show amazing determination—Grace to flee her family and Miss Jane to plow through life despite the challenges her body provides.  Grace’s story is a moving subplot in this book.  Her desire to be away from the farm and her family and what she is willing to do and not do to fulfill this desire, and how this impacts Grace’s relationship with Miss Jane is a powerful aspect of this book.

Dr. Thompson is another potent character in this story.  We learn about his concern for Miss Jane, his interactions with her family, his own personal life story, and his multi-year correspondence with the medical experts about Miss Jane.

Miss Jane’s relationships with Grace, Dr Thompson, her father, and her mother, and Elijah Key are important in shaping her although Miss jane’s relationship with herself is even more of a determinant.  As Brad Watson tells us in the first chapter  “She did not like the vexation of her incontinence, and wished she would outgrow it, but eventually accepted it as part of who she was, no matter how unsavory.  She determined that she would live like any other girl as best she could, and when she could no longer do that, she would adjust her life to its terms accordingly. So she did not fear her own strangeness, even though her awareness of it grew and evolved as she got older.  In time her gaunt, dark-haired beauty would be altered and sharpened by age, a visible sign of her difference, her independence, and a silent message to all that her presence in the world was impenetrable beyond a point of her own determination.”

Miss Jane and Miss Jane slowly embrace the reader showing the reader the possibilities that Miss Jane embraces as her body continues to provide her barriers and challenges that could overwhelm and blunt the human spirit.  Miss Jane provides us a tender and rare model that life is always what we make of it.

Missing Person

By Patrick Modiano

Published 1978 as “Rue des Boutiques Obscures”

English translation by Daniel Weissbort published in the UK 1980

Read Dec 2017

Patrick Modiano was awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature “for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation”. (Nobel Prize website).  Only some of his work has been translated from French and published in English, but Missing Person, for which he won France’s premier literary prize, the Prix Goncourt, fortunately is an exception.

Guy Roland, our narrator, has lost his memory.  For the past 8 years he has been employed as an investigator by C. M. Hutte who provided him with identity papers 10 years ago.  As the book opens, we learn that Hutte is closing his business and retiring, although he’s keeping the lease on the office and all the contents—all the society catalogs and directories so useful to his business at that time (no Google search engines available then…).  Roland and Hutte meet one last time as Hutte prepares to leave Paris.  Roland indicates he will now investigate his own past.  We learn, in passing, that Hutte too “had lost track of himself and a whole section of this life had been engulfed without leaving the slightest traces, the slightest connection that could still link him with the past.”  But our attention is directed back to Guy Roland’s investigation of his own past.

The narrator leads us through his investigation as he follows a path of leads as he speaks with people who may have known him or people with which he may have interacted and follows up on reports he receives from a fellow investigator.   Some of the people he speaks with give him physical items they have held for a potentially returning friend but with whom they have lost touch.    Roland uses a few photographs he receives to spark discussion with some of the leads.  Most of the people he meets do not recognize him, but this isn’t surprising as some twenty plus years have passed since they’ve last interacted with the person he once was, or they actually didn’t know the person he once was but rather only someone he once knew.   One person does recognize him and is surprised that Roland neither recognizes him nor recalls their shared experiences.  Roland now begins to recall pieces of the past, or at least thinks he does, and the text turns away from investigative reports to Roland to his recollections which lead to remembering a significant event after which his memory ceases. Clearly the event recalled could be one to trigger significant mental upheaval, but we don’t know if that’s the case or not.

Roland’s narration ends when he’s reached a dead-end with regard to a particular “witness” he’s pursued and as he plans to follow yet another path for information.  We don’t know if he will successfully fully identify himself or fill in his lost memories.  This ending separates the novel from a “standard” mystery.  It’s not solved.  The investigator can’t tell us the story that wraps it all up for his client or for the reader.

The concept of memory Is of much interest to many authors (Kazuo Ishiguro being one in particular) and to psychologists (noted Nobel Prize winner in economics Daniel Kahneman being a prime example).  Kahneman discusses the “remembering self” (what we recall) and the “experiencing self” (what is happening) and notes that “what people want is more closely associated with the remembering self. It’s — they want to have good memories. They want to have good opinions of themselves. They want to have a good story about their life.”   (from an interview by Kristin Tippett :  https://onbeing.org/programs/daniel-kahneman-why-we-contradict-ourselves-and-confound-each-other-oct2017/).

What is Guy Roland looking for?  The book begins with the sentence “I am nothing.”.  Is Roland seeking to know who he was?  To know that he was something?  To know what others thought of him?  To know that others remember him?  That Roland’s client is himself also makes this novel a “nonstandard” mystery.  However, it’s not unusual for the investigator’s client to be unclear about what they are really seeking.    That Roland continues his investigation suggests he hasn’t yet found what he’s seeking.  His final comment “do not our lives dissolve into the evening as quickly as this grief of childhood?” leaves us with no answers and only questions about Roland’s search and also about what we are looking for and what we memories we want ourselves.

Setting Free the Kites

By Alex George

Published 2017

Read Dec 2017

Setting Free the Kites is a wonderfully engaging story of two boys and their families.  This reader experienced a range of emotions as the boys and their families struggle with devastating losses and the turbulence of the teen age years.  The reader is obliquely offered some universal questions to consider although the author provides us no answers.   Perfect.

Robert Carter has lived in this particular coastal Maine town all of his life.  His father took over running the amusement park his father started in 1946 after his father died of a heart attack in 1959 while taking the first roller coaster ride of the day, in the first car, as was his habit.  While his father hadn’t wanted anything to do with the amusement park and got none of the kind of joy from the park that his father did, Robert’s father develops his own passion for the park with respect to keeping everything running and carving new horses for the carousel as old ones needed replacing.

The most important aspect of Robert Carter’s family’s life, however, is that his older brother, Liam, has Duchenne muscular dystrophy which is slowly destroying his muscles and will eventually lead to his premature death.   Robert’s mother was pregnant with him when they learned of Liam’s diagnosis, that the disease is hereditary, and that if the fetus she carried now was a boy there was a 50-50 chance he would have the disease as well.  Fortunately Robert develops normally as his brother continues to decline.  “As she [Robert’s mother] lifted her wreck of a son in and out of the bathtub each night, my mother knew that there was a world of grief to come, but at least the scope of the tragedy was finite now.”

Even at three Robert knew that his parents treated Liam differently than they treated him.  His father painted a dazzling mural across Liam’s wall—a dramatic jungle panorama.  “I knew I should not complain, should not begrudge my brother this one small thing.  But I ardently, secretly wished that my father would paint my bedroom wall, too.”  The family tolerates Liam’s love of current (1976) punk rock played at ear-breaking levels and appreciates that he “threw himself into everything”:  directing the school musical, learning the clarinet, even applying for colleges they knew that likely he would not attend.  His parents treat every annual event including Christmas and his birthday as if it were the last one, which they knew that one would eventually be.  When they finally lose Liam, “we stumbled out into the rest of our lives.” Robert’s father eventually moves into his repair shed, his mother withdraws from life as well for some time, and Robert is left to figure things out on his own.

But we learn all of this about Robert’s family after we meet Nathan Tilly and his father on Robert’s first day of eighth grade.  Robert learns that the bully that tormented him relentlessly the prior year was not promoted to ninth grade and the high school building but rather will be available to continue bullying him again this year.  Nathan, a new kid in town recently moved from Texas to a house outside of town right on the coast, finds Hollis dunking Robert’s head in a toilet in the locker room and rescues him.  Robert, Nathan, Hollis, Robert’s mother and Nathan’s father meet with the principal and, despite Robert’s discomfort, Nathan makes it clear that Hollis was bullying Robert.  Nathan’s father presses the principal to address the bullying problem.   The next day Robert learns that Hollis was belatedly promoted to ninth grade and won’t be available to bully Robert and that Nathan should be thanked for his actions.  Nathan and Robert ride their bikes to Nathan’s house for the promised celebratory ice cream Nathan’s father offered the day before.  When they arrive, Nathan’s father is flying a kite while perched on the roof of their house.  When he waves hello to the boys, he slips and falls to the ground.  He lives long enough to tell Nathan that he flew his kite on the roof so he could watch his wife as she walked on the beach in front of their house.  So by page 29 and the end of chapter 3, an outsider has rescued Robert from bullying and that outsider’s family has suffered a shocking, premature death.

We quickly learn that Nathan’s mother spends most of her time in her study, typing.  Nathan isn’t sure she even puts paper in the typewriter but he certainly hears her typing all of the time while chain smoking.  We also learn that Nathan and his father were very close and went on many interesting exciting adventures.  By the end of chapter 5 and page 48 Nathan and Robert have become good friends and are setting free the kites Nathan’s father made in his workshop.

The rest of the novel follows Nathan and Robert as they progress through the rest of the 1976/77 school year, the 1977 summer, during which Nathan and Robert join the seasonal workforce at Robert’s family’s amusement park and Nathan develops a crush on Faye, a high school girl, the fall of 1977 when Liam passes, the summer of 1978 when the boys have new jobs at the amusement park and Nathan’s crush on Faye continues.  There are a few flashbacks to fill in the story of Robert’s family’s amusement park and the story of Lewis, a handy-man at the park with whom the boys develop a friendship.  I won’t give away more of the story.

Robert is our narrator.  Much of the novel deals with death and loss.  He directly experiences Nathan’s father’s untimely and violent death, how the mother responds at the death scene, and some of how Nathan reacts to the loss.  Robert provides us much more detail about the huge loss of Liam.  He can tell us directly about how he feels about the loss and his reactions to his parents’ grief.  He can also tell us about the feelings he has as he and Nathan experience their adolescent summers.  George’s portrayal of Robert is very convincing.  We hear about Robert’s jealousy of the different treatment he and Liam get from their parents and the simultaneous understanding of why that is so.   Robert also admits to us that he is unhappy about Nathan’s crush on Faye—Nathan’s obsession with Faye means he has less time and energy for Robert.

George is effective in helping us feel the impact of the unexpected death of Nathan’s father and the expected but devastating death of Liam.  Readers who are parents are likely to feel confronted with the realization of how unevenly we treat our children while we likely tell them we love them all equally,   about the secrets we keep from them, and about our incapability to shield them from the pain and suffering we feel when we lose a child.

George’s use of an amusement park as Robert’s family business is very interesting.  The relationships each Robert’s grandfather, father, and Robert have with the business—at least through Robert’s narrator eyes—are very different.  George, through Robert, comments on the role the business plays in the economy of the area.  In addition, the amusement park provides a convenient setting for progressing the Nathan/Faye relationship and the continuing relationship of Hollis with the boys.  This was very skillfully done.

Apparently Robert’s name came from a character naming auction benefitting a charity.  I understand why someone would enjoy having their name associated with a book by this author and I look forward to more of his work.

Human Acts

By Han Kang

Published in Korean as “The Boy is Coming” 2014

Translated from the Korean and introduced by Deborah Smith

Published in English 2016

Read Nov 2017

The translator’s introduction provides useful and necessary background for the novel’s readers.  Park Chung-hee ruled South Korea from his coup in 1961until his assassination in 1979.  Although credited for enabling substantial progress in Koras industrialization, he became an authoritarian who instituted increasingly repressive measures and declared martial law when demonstrations in the southern regions were held.  His successor, Chun Doo-hwan expanded martial law throughout the country.  Student demonstrations in the southern city of Gwangju brought brutal retribution by the military and the violence committed in a particular raid on a small student militia is the focus of this novel.

This novel brings to us the outcomes of the violence committed by the military against the protesters through an interesting use of voices and perspective.  Six chapters, each focused on an individual present at that particular raid, are told from a variety of first, second, and third person perspectives and are set in time periods from the May 15 1980, the day of the violent suppression, through 2010; some chapters involve flashbacks to tell us more about the specifics of that day.  The seventh chapter is an epilogue that shows how a writer comes to learn about the event in 2013 and decides to tell the story of The Boy we meet in chapter 1.

The translator’s introduction also describes the care she took to support the author’s desire that “the translation maintain the moral ambivalence of the original, and avoid sensationalizing the sorrow and shame that her hometown was made to bear.”   The results are stunning and unforgettable.  In addition to two protesters killed during the raid, protesters that survive, and family members of those who didn’t are voices we hear in various chapters. We leave understanding even for those who survive, their lives are forever changed and their grief inescapable.  The author effectively helps us understand that such can be the outcome of human acts.

Wonder

By R.J. Palacio

Published 2012

Read Nov 2017

It’s easy to understand why this book was on the New York Times bestseller list for 80 weeks (36 in #1 position), sold 1 million copies (print and digital) within 18 months of its release, and is now a movie with Julia Roberts and Owen Wilson as Auggie’s parents.  The sad, funny, and uplifting story is about a 10 year old boy with an unusual syndrome causing him to experience 27 surgeries just to get to a face that everyone turns away from when they first see it.  “I won’t describe what I look like.  Whatever you’re thinking, it’s probably worse.”  His parents have decided he should move from home schooling to attending a real school now that he’s ready to start 5^th grade, the first year of middle school in their area (“the hippy-stroller capital of Upper Manhattan”).  He’s more than reluctant but a part of him knew he should go so he does.  It’s a very tough school year but he makes it through with grace.  In the words of his principal his “quiet strength has carried up the most hearts”.

Palacio tells the story through very short but compelling chapters in eight sections through the voices of Auggie (August), Via (Auggie’s sister who is starting high school), Summer (Auggie’s new friend who befriends him on her own), Jack (initially Auggie’s buddy at the bequest of the principal but turns into a real friend after a difficult incident), Justin (Via’s new boyfriend), and Miranda (Via’s best friend forever until returning from summer camp just before they start high school).  Palacio does well in giving each of them believable voices that will certainly engage a younger reader but that draws in the adult reader as well.

The picture the children’s voices paint includes Auggie’s committed but imperfect parents seeking to help him make his way in the world in the face of not knowing what  is the right course.  Their willingness to take action despite discomfort is a great model for all.  Mr. Tushman (a nice comedic touch that both the characters and the readers enjoy) is clearly well meaning and committed to Auggie’s success .  He makes some good choices and some not so good choices in finding buddies to support Auggie’s assimilation into the school—again teaching that no adult, thus no human, is perfect but we must do the best we know how to do.  We are privy to confusing and sometimes painful choices and events in each character’s life as they grow as middle and high school students.  We cheer their good choices and wince at some poorer choices and are relieved that they help each other through some really difficult situations.

Palacio uses the device of the 5^th grade graduation event and corresponding speech from Mr Tushman to deliver her most important message:  “If every single person in this room made it a rule that wherever you are, whenever you can, you will try to act a little kinder than is necessary—the world really would be a better place.”    I don’t read many (any?) books that have this message and I’m glad I got to read this one and enjoy the way Palacio did it.

Shelter

By Jung Yun

Published 2016

Read Oct 2017

The Characters:

• A mid-thirties couple with student loans, credit card debt, and their house financially “under-water”. He’s a biology professor who immigrated to the US from Korea with his parents when he was four years old.  She is the daughter of a local Irish cop and is staying home with their four-year son, old until he goes to school, and studying for a master’s degree in the meantime.
• His parents who live nearby in a more exclusive house and are wealthy from his patents. He was born in Korea but received his PhD in the US and is a successful engineering professor at the same college as his son.  She has never worked outside the house but has spent much time and money decorating their home.

The Situation:

• The son and wife decide they must sell their house to begin dealing with their debt. They are considering staying with his parents while they rent it in the interim.
• The son has spent much effort keeping his parents out of his own family’s life but also has chosen to stay in his hometown to be near them.
• His mother is found wandering naked in the green space between their housing development and his parents.
• The parents have suffered a home invasion during which the wife and their housekeeper have been brutally raped and the father has been severely beaten.
• The parents are unable to stay at their home for some time and need to stay with their son and family.

Yun tells a story of personal disappointment, family obligations, racial discrimination, parenting, cross-cultural marriage, domestic abuse, debt, and more using a violent crime to drive the characters to confront these issues.  The reader is privy to the son’s thoughts and feelings and his interpretations of the other characters’ thoughts and actions.  Yun rapidly engages our sympathy for all of these characters and we hope the situation can draw the family together while we simultaneously understand that’s not going to be simple to accomplish.  We cringe at the some of the decisions the son makes which will further complicate his life while we see they aren’t totally surprising, especially considering the horrific event with which he and his family are trying to cope and the family’s past which they have buried.

The author effectively drives the reader, as well as the family members, to confront the issues he raises.  As the novel progresses we begin to recognize that his themes are actually universal that we all must address.  That is the magic of this novel.