Category: Modern Fiction

Evil Eye

By Etaf Rum

Published 2023

Read Feb 2024

Etaf Rum was born and raised in Brooklyn, NY, by parents who immigrated from refugee camps in Palestine where they were raised.  Rum’s grandparents lived in refugee camps most of their lives. Rum has now brought the world two books with stories that describe how at least some Palestinian immigrant families like hers work to maintain their culture after they come to this country.  The critical elements of the culture she describes:  1) a woman’s role and responsibilities are to marry, birth sons, raise children, obey her husband and her husband’s parents; 2) a man’s role and responsibilities are to marry a pure woman, produce sons, provide for his family, and keep his wife and daughters safe, pure, and obedient by any means necessary; 3) the oldest sons has an additional role:   to support his father in providing for the family while supporting his own family, produce sons, and to obey his parents.

Etaf Rum’s first book A Woman is No Man was a New York Times Best Seller and a post about it can be found on this website.  This reader wished to share the book with one of her book groups but it was considered “too dark”.  This reader acknowledges that it was quite “dark” but feels that the story highlights important enables readers to confront desires of immigrants coming to this county to retain their home community’s culture and not assimilate into the general culture of the county they are joining. 

Etaf Rum’s new book, Evil Eye, gives a new story that shares this theme and some of the “darkness” of her first book.  It’s likely this book is more autobiographical than her first book as the protagonist shares many aspects of Rum’s actual life.  This reader anticipates writing this book was somewhat cathartic for the author.  The author’s own experience enables Rum’s descriptions of the protagonist’s struggles with her marriage believable.  At times these frustrations and the character’s reactions/actions seem repetitive but that too is believable. This story is absolutely not as dark as the story in her first book but also sometime not as engaging.  This reader will leave the plot for future readers to discover.

Rum doesn’t preach the best way for immigrants to settle in this country—assimilate rapidly or retain your culture at all costs- for the immigrants themselves and their children.  She acknowledges the challenges both the immigrants and their children face and provides her readers with some insight into these struggles.    

Rum’s book allows us to consider the expectations of people in the receiving country of immigrants.  While we like to think of the United States as a “melting pot” of cultures of all the different immigrants that came to this land and that all will naturally assimilate into the culture while retaining “nice” aspects of their culture (such as food, dress, and holiday practices).  However, the challenges of immigrants and their families are not all the same, especially those whose religion is not Judeo-Christian, the predominant culture in the US.  However, some of the concerns are universal.  Purity of one’s daughter until marriage has historically been an important goal regardless of place of origin or religion.  The advent of The Pill in the sixties and fairly ready access to birth control lowered the consequences of pre-marital sex and astronomically changed the cultural norms of courtship and marriage in many—but not all—countries, although at different rates.  Acceptance of women in the workplace and in politics, specifically assuming roles outside child-rearing and home-making, similarly has changed norms but again far from identically in different countries and cultures.  Is the world “going to hell in a hand basket” as a result? Should immigrants—and current residents—who don’t want to allow women to have a role in society beyond marriage and childcare be forced to accept these “newfangled” notions and support their daughters in pursing options they didn’t consider themselves?  Many things drive people to migrate so these questions will continue to be faced by society in general as strong differences in opinion regarding “the right way to be” continue to exist.   Rum’s books add interesting fuel for such discussions and this reader will continue to suggest others read her work. 

French Braid

By Anne Tyler

Published 2022

Read July 2022

As usual Anne Tyler gives us an interesting story of family relationships, this time a family saga spanning from 1959 to late summer2020.  Yes, it does include the impact of COVID -19 on these family relationships.  Each of seven sections focuses on a different family member and their perspectives of what’s happening in the particular time frame of the section.  The sections generally move forward in time although there is some overall.  It may seem at times a little disjointed since there is sometimes substantial time between sections but this reader took this in stride and just enjoyed Tyler’s wonderful gift for looking inside people and how they influence the relationships they are in. 

This reader hopes Anne Tyler keeps writing!

Behind the Scenes at the Museum

By Kate Atkinson

Published 1995

Read July 2023; November 2023

Our book club is going to discuss this book soon so this reader decided to become refreshed on the details. (Our book club meets for 2.5 hours and the discussions are quite extensive so it’s good to be prepared.) 

This reader’s first reading left the impression of a story of women generally until The Pill became available—your lot was either spinsterhood with the hope of living with a family member or going into service, or teaching, or an unhappy life being married with too many children and a household to manage.  Several of the books this reader has happened upon lately show this same story in a variety of ways.

This reader’s second reading was informed by the first.  But fortunately, there was much more to the book.  Some topics covered:  The difficulties of the brothers of those sisters when faced with being a solider and dying in the war or surviving it but….  The hopes of the various women for an exciting life or at least a life they like living. How mean young children can be and the consequences of their abrupt actions.  And more and more. 

The narrator, Ruby Lennox, provides us vivid scenes from many parts of her life from the moment of conception through to the end of her mother’s life.   She is convinced at birth that her mother isn’t really her mother and she retains that feeling through most of her life.  But perhaps it’s a feeling enabled by her mother’s surprise at living a life she didn’t intend, having a husband who isn’t who she thought he was, and having children that she didn’t plan to have but did have as a consequence of the marital bed. 

In between thirteen chapters narrated by Rudy are “footnotes” that tell the story of Ruby’s mother Bunty, Bunty’s mother Nell, and Nell’s mother Alice:  their pre-marriage situation, how they became a married woman, and how they dealt with that situation.   There are also “footnotes” about the Nell’s brothers including scenes from their pre-war days and while in the war (The Great War). 

Alice is the only one of these women who escapes her married life—by running off with the travelling photographer—but eventually has regrets about this.  Nell’s sister Lillian has a child out-of-wedlock and leaves the country — an extreme way of leaving town.  She does eventually marry but clearly has a different grip on life than her sister, mother, or niece.  Although Ruby gives us a lot of detail about her early years and her sisters Patricia and Gillian during these years, she gives us little detail about her married life although she does indicate she and her friend Kathleen eventually divorce their respective husbands. 

In summary this book gives an interesting look at womanhood in working-class England through a number of generations showing the similarities of their challenges and the variety of ways these women face them. 

This reader definitely began to savor the book on second reading and was glad the second reading was undertaken.  The richness of the writing approach and the characters was much more evident the second time through for this reader.  I now look forward to the discussion and am now glad the book was on the season’s schedule. 

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow

By Gabrielle Zevin

Published 2022

Read Aug 2023

Like many readers of this book, this is the first Gabrielle Zevin book this reader has read.  Apparently, she has had some big hits as well as some books that haven’t achieved commercial success even if the critics liked them. Based on this book, this reader looks forward to reading more of her work.

This reader is not a gamer but that doesn’t matter because the book is really about people, their relationships, and product development. 

Product development leverages current technologies and creates new ones as necessary to create a design that will be appealing to its customers.  Fast product development is universally desired by owners of companies so that revenues can be generated as fast as possible.  In small start-ups like the one described here—owned by two college dropouts who are the product designers/developers and their friend who is “producing” it—everyone pitches in to do all the stuff needed beside the actual product development.  The descriptions of the intensity of the work to get it to market is pretty believable given the need to generate revenue—they are starving otherwise—and the intensity of the market they are in.  The book also nicely describes the evolution of companies as they move into second generation products—how the relationships between various starting members can and perhaps must change.

Reading about the games that the characters play and develop was actually quite interesting to this reader.  As a non-gamer it was a rare glimpse into this world.  Two aspects of particular interest:  1) The complexity of the computer programming required to create the video games of our times—players moving around in complex landscapes, interacting with various “artificial” characters in the game and interacting with various other players that are on-line and in the game at the same time.  2) The male dominance of video game production.  This was accented in the book by the female protagonist who deals with the condescending way non-company members treat her but not her colleagues with whom she has equal importance in the organization as a primary programmer. 

This glimpse of gaming has been useful as this reader has read other books recently (particularly The Ink Black Heart by Robert Galbraith and The Three Body Problem by Cixin Li) that involve gaming in one way or another. This reader anticipates this will be increasingly common in current modern fiction.   Video games, although not a part of this reader’s life, is a huge component of society so having some understanding of the culture is as useful to non-gamers as having an understanding of recorded music would have been to the generation who was raised before its popularity.

The characters are great—each has attributes that make them deserving of a reader’s interest and empathy while also having flaws or attributes that make them real and believable.  This reader’s opinion of and warmth towards each of the main characters varied substantially at different parts of the story—something this reader greatly appreciates. 

This reader may be reading more of this author.  Certainly, this reader would really enjoy discussing this book with others—also something this reader greatly appreciates. 

The Covenant of Water

By Abraham Vergeshe

Published 2023

Read June 2023

It’s fitting that the first literature blog I’ve written in almost a year is for this book.  It’s long.  It’s full of medical details.  It may be exasperating to some because the main characters are all so fundamentally good.  But it is so well done.  After nearly a year of reading lots of books but few “serious” ones this book definitely engaged me thoroughly and left me unable to start a new book for several days.  Perhaps this is a strange criteria for categorization of books but a real one for me.  When a book leaves me in a state of savoring and digesting and waiting for those actions to be thoroughly over before I start a new book, it’s definitely in a winner’s circle for me. 

We start in 1900 when one of our protagonists is twelve years old and being married off to a man of forty.  We are ready to hate him but can’t.  He needs a mother for his son.  He needs someone to cook and clean and make a home for him and his son as he works hard to create something from nothing on this growing piece of property on a river— a river he avoids with a passion we slowly come to understand over the next 700 pages.  Only when our protagonist—now known as Big Aimichee— is sixteen and has past puberty, learned to cook and clean well, has firmly become JoJo’s mother, and has begun to appreciate her husband, does this husband invite our protagonist into his bedroom. 

She first bears him a daughter, who they learn will remain a child in thoughts and actions, but a beloved one to both her family and this reader.  She later bears him a son when she is older, Philopose, who doesn’t know his father who dies. 

There are other characters in this sprawling book whose stories eventually connect.  None of the characters are “bad” or “evil” some certainly have more flaws than others. 

This reader prefers this book to the author’s earlier “Cutting for Stone” although this reader nominated that book for her book club which discussed it with vigor.  The characters are rounder and most win your affection and have you cheering for them when they are facing adversity tough choices.  They don’t always pick the route you would choose for them but that of course makes the book engaging and believable.  Read and relish this book. 

The Patron Saint of Liars

By Ann Patchett

Published 1992

Read April 2022

Run

By Ann Patchett

Published 2007

Read May 2022

This reader is putting comments on these two books together as the comments are quite overdue. 

This reader is a fan of Ann Patchett.  Each novel tells a unique and interesting story.  Each novel provides the reader interesting characters.  Often the story is told through the perspective of one or more characters, but only some of the character is revealed through this approach, much is left unsaid and untold.  That makes the novel both engaging and rich for this reader.

The Patron Saint of Liars, Patchett’s first novel, tells pieces of the overall story through four sections, each focused on one of the characters, human and otherwise.  The first section is about the origins of Hotel Louisa in the small town of Habit, Kentucky.  By the time this story starts in 1968, the hotel has become a home for unmarried pregnant women, run by a Catholic order of nuns.  Rose’s section is second and tells us about a woman who leaves her husband (with only a note saying she is leaving and he shouldn’t try to find her) when she discovers she is pregnant and decides she can’t go through with the pregnancy.  She winds up at the home for unwed mothers in Habit, KY, installs herself as an unpaid member of the staff, keeps her child, marries Son, another person who ended up a member of the staff, and raises daughter Cecilia in a non-standard way.   The third section is told through Son’s perspective which gives some background regarding why he is there and why he didn’t want “their” daughter to be named Cecilia.  The last section is told through Sissy/Cecilia’s perspective.  Some things are explained, much isn’t.  This reader found the balance perfect.

Run tells a story about an unusual family.  Bernadette Doyle expected to have a large Irish family like her own but she and husband Bernard succeed in having only one biological child, Sullivan.  They adopt a pair of brothers forming a biracial family (the twins are black).  Bernadette dies when the “little boys” are 4 and Sullivan is 17.  The story is focused on a time 17 years later when the little boys are in college (remaining in Boston per their ex-Boston Mayor father’s wishes) and Sullivan only occasionally interacts with the family.  The boys (once again) reluctantly accompany their father to a lecture on campus that their father wants them to attend.  An incident that occurs after the lecture sets into motion a more complicated story about their family than they could have imagined (and which won’t be divulged here).  As usual Patchett slowly develops the characters but leaves some things unexplained.   Once again, the balance was fine for this reader. This reader will continue seeking and reading Patchett novels and hopes she has a very long run of writing. 

The Most Fun We Ever Had

By Claire Lombardo

Published 2019

Read Feb 2022

Lombardo’s long (~550pages) debut novel is a winner in this reader’s opinion.  It’s a family saga covering about four decades in the lives of Marilyn Connelly and David Sorenson and their children.  Marilyn and David meet in 1975 in Chicago when both are undergraduates (making them contemporaries of this reader).  When David learns that he’s been accepted to medical school in Iowa, he proposes marriage to Marilyn and she accepts.  She intends to finish her undergraduate degree in Iowa but loss of credits in the transfer process, loneliness as David is consumed in his studies and she knows no one, and ultimately a pregnancy ahead of their schedule mean Marilyn drops out of college.  Her career as homemaker/mother is solidified when their second daughter arrives less than a year after the first.

The “Irish twins” Wendy and Violet are clearly sisters—both best friends and fierce competitors– and as different as can be imagined. Wendy is caustic, turbulent, seemingly strong but tending towards self-destructive.   Wendy refuses to go to college, moves out of the house, meets the love of her life whom she marries and loses him to cancer at a young age after their son dies as a baby.  Violet is a type-A personality who gets her law degree, marries another lawyer, has two children, has a seemingly perfect life, but suffers from depression.  Violet’s lack of appreciation for the apparent wonderfulness of her life infuriates Wendy whose life has been so disrupted by the deaths of her baby and husband. Younger sister Liza has a long-term partner who is in a very deep state of depression.  Liza becomes pregnant and her partner leaves her when he learns she’s had an affair.  Nine years after Liza’s birth Marilyn and David decide to take another spin at parenthood and generate Grace whose nickname evolves from “gosling” to “goose” as she grows up although she feels no one in the family will ever realize she’s become an adult.  The daughters are convinced their parents have a perfect marriage and that they can never attain such perfection in their own lives.  Actually, while David and Marilyn have an enviable relationship, it is, of course, far from perfect. 

Wendy and Violet share a special secret.  When Violet found herself pregnant, Wendy took her in and helped her hide from the family during her pregnancy.  Fifteen years later, Violet’s son comes into the family’s life providing an interesting view into the family and the relationships between the various members of it. 

The structure of the book is interesting if complex.  The author shifts back and forth in time and between various characters as she gives their perspective on various events/scenes in their lives.  The story of David and Marilyn’s relationship is the only thing told chronologically; the author heads these chapters with the dates that the chapter covers.  The complexity of the structure and the varying points of view emphasizes the complexity of the life of any family.  No two children have the same childhood, even when they are separated in age by less than a year, and especially when they are separated in age by over a decade.  The parents’ persona each vary by year and even by month with respect to their level of exhaustion from caring for their children, their home, their work, and their own relationship with each other.  The author captures this evolution with accuracy despite her own relative youth.  Being the “gosling” in her own family likely gave her some help in depicting this. 

The author beautifully captures some great parenting moments.  One in particular is the scene when Violet questions her mother about her decision to leave college, a possibility Violet can’t fathom; Marilyn’s responses are not satisfactory to Violet.  This scene so nicely highlights that many of the choices we face in life aren’t the ones we anticipated having but they are the ones we have and we have to make decisions nonetheless. 

This debut novel is long, but so nicely done that this reader didn’t mind the length at all.  This author was reminded of Anne Patchett in her ability to draw the reader into the lives of her characters so that the reader enjoyed every word spent with them.  This reader was well satisfied with the author’s approach to the book’s closure.  This reader hopes that Lombardo’s next offering is as rich and beautifully textured.

Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits

By Laila Lami

Published 2005

Read Nov 2021

The Beekeeper of Aleppo

By Christy Lefteri

Published 2019

Read Feb 2022

This reader is coupling together these two books in a single essay to allow her to compare and contrast them.

Both books deal with refugees fleeing dire situations who need to cross a body of water in a dangerous way—a rubber boat—and usually engage with smugglers to accomplish the goal of getting to their desired destination and stay there.

In Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, the north African refugees are primarily seeking a place where they can work, make a living, and send money home to family so they can join them.  One of the refugees has gotten herself in trouble politically and is seeking refuge to avoid her enemies.

In The Beekeeper of Aleppo, the primary characters are fleeing Syria because the war has demolished their neighborhood.  Also, Nuri has been warned that he will have to take up arms with the unit that holds their neighborhood or he will be killed.  Other characters Nuri encounters are leaving various countries for various reasons. 

With respect to structure, both books tell their stories in an asynchronous manner.  Time and place of the setting change from section to section.  Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits starts with the sea crossing, turns back to pre-crossing life, and then moves to post-crossing times.  “Current” in The Beekeeper of Aleppo is while Nuri and his wife Afra’s stay at a “B and B” in London housing a number of refugees and while they  work with a social worker to prepare for their asylum hearing.  Sections jump back to various times in Nuri’s life with most emphasis on deciding to flee Syria and various stages of their journey to get to London.

The biggest differences between the books are choice of the primary character and point of view.  In Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, there are four Moroccan characters, two men and two women.  By choosing these four characters, the author explores the differing drivers for leaving Morocco.  Of course, all are seeking a better life.  The two men are seeking a place to find work that can support them and their families, preferably that utilize their university training.  Their outcomes are very different but both come to an understanding of what’s important to them.  One woman is fleeing an abusive husband.  The other woman is fleeing due to an issue she created for herself in speaking against the current government.  The author tells us what the particular character is saying, thinking, and feeling, and sometimes includes dialogue and characters that point out other issues.  For example, the female student hopes that her friend’s father can use influence to get her a position, something he does for others and which he knows is an abuse of his power.  The chapters are focused on individual characters with their primary connection being that they all cross the sea together.

In The Beekeeper of Aleppo, Nuri generally narrates the story although the author uses some recalled dialog and emails between Nuri and his cousin as well.  While following Nuri and Afra on their perilous journey, there is much time spent with Nuri providing us his thoughts and feelings.  This allows us to more deeply understand the trauma that cause both Nuri and his wife to suffer both physical (Afra’s blindness) and mental (Nuri’s less obvious PTSD) distress.  Since Nuri is telling us the story vs an all-knowing narrator, the reader must rely on Nuri’s words to slowly reveal what they are really going through beyond the physical challenges of trying to escape from the devastation of Syria and we slowly understand that Nuri is suffering a breakdown while at awaiting his asylum hearing in the UK.     Both are interesting books that provide the reader a glimpse into the plight of refugees.  Given a choice of the two, this reader would promote The Beekeeper of Aleppo for its skill in using the narration of a single character to probe very deeply into the psyche of one refugee whose story is far too common

Crossing to Safety

By Wallace Stegner

Published 1987

Read Nov 2021

Larry Morgan narrates the story of the friendship between he and his wife, Sally, and Sid and Charity Lang.  He begins with their arrival to Sid and Charity’s Vermont camp as they’ve been summoned there by Charity who is dying of cancer.  Larry sweeps back to the beginning of their friendship which begins when Larry and Sally come to Madison, WI in the early 1930’s for a one-year contract Larry has to teach in the English department of the University of Wisconsin.  He and Sally have moved from California and have very few resources so they count their pennies very closely.   Sid is also an instructor in the English department.  Sid and Sally have been in Madison for six years hailing from the east, Ivy league schooling and money.  Larry and Sally are invited to a dinner party at Sid and Charity’s home and their lives are transformed by the evening when Sid and Charity embrace them as bosom friends. 

Larry wants to be a successful writer and pours all his energies, when not dealing with his teaching responsibilities, into writing and submitting his work for publication.   Sally is supportive but also grateful for her friendship with Charity so that she has someone with whom to spend time while Larry focuses on his work.  Sally and Charity have bonded quickly as expectant mothers.  Larry’s focus pays off and some of his work is published that year but budget constraints due to the Depression means Larry can’t be offered another contract by the university.  Charity is adamant that Sid earns tenure as Charity’s father has done and has little patience with Sid’s desire to write and publish poetry.  The English department also can’t give Sid tenure this year which means he has also lost his job.  Sid and Charity and their kids return to the Lang family camp in Vermont for the summer and take Sally with them while Larry teaches a summer class before he joins them. 

Larry’s narration tells of the friendship that survives through four decades although Larry and Sid’s paths diverge and both couples face a number of difficult times.  Larry does become a successful writer but Sally contracts and survives polio and is left with serious physical disability.   Sid eventually gains a tenured position but feels he has failed his domineering wife who has followed in her mother’s footsteps of bossing her husband around and orchestrating everything that happens in the household.

While this is a novel about a lasting friendship, it may primarily actually be a book about marriage.  Here we see two marriages that survive despite their challenges and the pressure they put upon the respective marriages.  A. O. Scott wrote in a New York Times article  “Stegner’s settings range from academia and the literary world to mining camps and boomtowns, but his most consistent subject is marriage, represented in a mode more epic than romantic. Monogamy, with its crags and chasms, is the most salient and imposing feature in his imaginative landscape, the human undertaking around which all the others are organized.”   The Lang’s marriage is clearly not always a happy one but neither Sid nor Charity could conceive of not remaining married.  Larry reveals that he is dependent on Sally as much as she is on him.   He can’t imagine life without her.  In this, his last novel, Stegner shows us lives lived within the bonds of marriage, something he clearly reveres.