Blog

Bangkok Wakes to Rain

By Pitchaya Sudbanthad

Published 2019

Read Nov 2021

This novel follows an approach somewhat similar to The Overstory: many characters are introduced in separate chapters that seem like separate individual stories.  Unlike The Overstory, all the characters introduced are not brought together at some point.  The closest thing to connection between many of them is a house built in the distant past that is eventually converted to a condominium tower with the last home owner in the penthouse.  In this book, the characters that are introduced are not necessarily even ever seen again, such as an engineering student who gets involved in the student demonstrations in 1973.  He is killed during the demonstration but his girlfriend, Nee, who is a fairly minor character in this chapter, is introduced.  She is one of two sisters whose family members appear in several chapters.  Nok, Nee’s sister has gone to Japan to attend university but stays there and opens a Thai restaurant.  The sisters become estranged when Nok unknowingly serves food to a coronel involved in the student slaughter in 1973 and who later fled when his regime is overthrown.  Nee and Nok’s children and grandchildren are characters in some of the later chapters. 

The timeframe covered in the book is quite large, starting in the late 1800’s with an English doctor who arrives to provide healthcare to a Christian mission, and going to some unspecified time in the future.  The author veers into speculative fiction for these later times.  Bangkok is in 2021 actually already certainly sinking and the country is already suffering from ocean rise due to climate change.  The author takes this aspect further with chapters in which Bangkok is mainly underwater; he amplifies the current disparity of impact of ocean rise related to socioeconomic class. 

He goes another speculative path in chapters with a character, Mia, a friend of a daughter of Nee, who was involved in designing and implementing a technology that allows people to leave their bodies behind and have their minds exist in some sort of virtual reality.  Mia went through this process herself.  She meets her friend, Pig, occasionally in a virtual reality space when Pig undergoes some kind of temporary process that allows her to interact with transformed people.  Pig’s children are encouraging her to undergo the transformation that Mia did before Pig’s body dies, but Pig is resisting. 

So, the book takes on a huge amount of social issue territory and does so somewhat successfully. Climate change, the large gap in resources available to persons on different parts of the socioeconomic ladder, racism, government instability and its impacts among others.  

However, the very loose connection of the various stories and the sometime overly meticulous detail of the geography resulted in a loss of any rhythm of the human stories for which this reader hungered.  This reader stopped about midway in the book and started reading from the beginning again as she had lost track of the various characters.  It didn’t get much easier in the second half but this reader didn’t decide to re-read that half as well and settled for a general impression of the book vs a more detailed and more deep analytical consideration of it.  There is much going on in this book and a reader willing to put in the time and effort will find much to consider.  Certainly, it is a “discussable” book and one that this reader’s book group explored deeply.  As usual, this discussion provided this reader  a much greater appreciation of the book than she had at the start of the discussion. 

This reader is generally glad it was a part of her book group’s schedule so that she persevered through the book.  The author isn’t fully successful but as a debut novel, there is much hope for even better novels to come from this author. 

Waking Lions

By Ayelet Gundar-Goshen

Published 2014

Read May 2019

This is another book whose essay got left behind in a flurry of reading.  However, it is certainly a book to consider reading for its engaging story, its interesting, flawed, and human characters, and for the glimpse it provides of illegal immigrants trying to find a place for themselves away from the hostilities they fled.

The protagonist is a neurosurgeon who, because of a fight with his superior, finds himself working in a desert town rather than Tel Aviv.  One night on his commute home after a long shift, he strikes a man, an Eritrean immigrant, in the road.  He gets of the car long enough to realize the man is likely dead and leaves him where he found him.  The next day, the man’s widow comes to his door with his wallet which he dropped at the scene of the crime.  They enter a black-mail relationship whereby the doctor treats other immigrants, most of whom are in Israel illegally.  The doctor spends his nights and weekends treating these patients while his wife, a member of the local police department, is investigating the hit-and-run accident. 

The book has a thriller feel at times but mainly considers the evolving relationship of the doctor and the widow, the doctor’s relationship with himself and his crime, and the growing gap between him and his wife.   It is a very worthy read.   

Lincoln in the Bardo

By George Saunders

Published 2017

Read Sept 2018

 George Saunders was intrigued by a story he heard about Abraham Lincoln visiting the crypt in Oak Hill Cemetery in Georgetown that temporarily held his son, Willie, who died at age 11 in 1862.  Lincoln apparently visited Willie’s crypt and may have held his body.   Willie’s body was eventually moved to Illinois after Lincoln was assassinated and he lies with his father in Lincoln’s tomb.

 Saunders created a story involving a number of ghosts who may or may not know they are dead, or at least don’t necessarily acknowledge it. It seems adults can live in an “interim” state as a ghost for a long time but children need to leave this “interim” state fairly quickly or meet some unspecified consequence.   The various characters watch the funeral, interact with Willie’s ghost, watch Lincoln visit him, and eventually counsel Willie to leave his ghost state for the “beyond”.  They even inhabit Lincoln temporarily to encourage him to let Willie go. 

This reader recommends listening to the audio version of this very unusual literature piece. Saunders recruited actors, friends, and even family to record this book which includes 166 characters.  In between comments from the various characters (complete with a line that specifies the character’s name) there are snippets from various newspapers and books that report various events happening in real life during the period of Willie’s illness, death, and internment.  These too are attributed to their source, although it’s not clear which are real and which might be manufactured.  Regardless, they are useful to the reader to provide context to what preceded and followed Willie’s death, although the various sources don’t necessarily agree on many of the details. 

Certainly, the reader needs to suspend disbelief and just surrender to the concepts and format Saunders has devised.  Once the reader understands them, which wasn’t instantaneous for this reader and was helped by looking at a written version of the book, it’s quite an interesting approach to this story of Willie’s death and Lincoln’s grief.    The grief Lincoln felt when Willie died is not an invention but well documented, and Saunders certainly captures that well.  The concept that Willie must finish his trip to the beyond and that both he and Lincoln must suffer great sorrow to enable this is quite convincing, even if the characters that are involved are ghosts. 

While this reader anticipates that the written word works fine for the book, this reader is convinced that the audio version will provide an even deeper experience and one not to be exceeded for some time. 

Let the Northern Light Erase Your Name

By Vida Vendela

Published 2007

Read April 2018 and July 2021

This reader didn’t write an essay about this book when first read not because it wasn’t worthy of it but because she just plain got behind.  In fact, this reader re-read the book a few months ago and might re-read it again.  Clearly much attraction to this book…

The protagonist loses her father abruptly when he dies in his sixties of a heart attack.  When working through his estate our protagonist finds her birth certificate which indicates he is not her biological father after all.  She had suffered another abrupt loss of a parent when her mother walked out on the family years prior, when our protagonist was 14, with no warning.  It turns out her fiancée, Pankaj, (the boy next door) learned from his mother about the paternity secret some fifteen years earlier but never told our protagonist.  Feeling fully abandoned and tricked by everyone she knows, our protagonist takes off for Lapland, a region in northern Finland, to find the father listed on her birth certificate.  The story follows our protagonist on her long and not simple journey to the church where her supposed biological father is a minister.  There she learns that he isn’t her real father either.  She doggedly pursues her quest to learn more about her mother, her real father, why her mother left her family, and how she should view herself now. 

So, the attraction to read was and is the interesting journey the protagonist takes to find out about her past, the descriptions of the geography and the particulars of the journey, and the people she meets.  The tardiness in writing about this very interesting book?   The protagonist’s journey is difficult physically and mentally and what she learns is difficult to digest for her and for the reader.  How to move on?  It’s not obvious to her or this reader. 

This reader may read yet again to seek a path forward.  Definitely worth the read. 

The Spectator Bird

By Wallace Stegner

Published 1976

Read Oct 2021

Joe Allston was a successful literary agent in New York City for many years.  About eight years prior to the start of this story he and his wife moved to a house outside of San Francisco after he retired.  Apparently, they were pretty active socially initially and enjoyed showing off their property and Ruth’s excellent cooking.  They have started losing friends to the usual reasons associated with retirement and have become more withdrawn from society.  At the same time, Joe has started experiencing the usual aches and pains that accompany aging.

One day they receive a postcard from Astrid, a Countess from whom they rented rooms in her apartment while in Denmark 20 years ago after the death of their son (accident?  Suicide?  Not clear…) and a serious illness Joe suffered.  Initially Joe doesn’t tell Ruth they received the postcard but does later that evening when he brings journals from that time into their bedroom where they spend their evenings reading and watching TV.  Ruth convinces Joe to read the journals aloud although both of them anticipate the experience will incur some pain for both of them.  Ruth is interested in “getting the pebble out of her shoe” regarding what really happened between Joe and Astrid.

The book alternates between sessions reading the journal (with its extensive details including dialog…) and present day (~1976) in which Joe narrates their various events, including a visit from a former client who is a famous Italian author, and Joe’s thoughts about his current physical and mental state. 

While it’s clear the “current” and “past” sections both occurred in the past (no cell phones, no computer searches but rather investigations using “Who’s Who” and other written documents in a library) much is quite universal and timeless.  As someone who has been retired about seven years and who also moved to an enviable lake house, this reader found Joe’s comments very close to home at times.  Certainly, the story of their trip to Denmark provides some startling details but the most relevant aspects for this reader are about Joe’s review of his current situation and how he came to it.  His comments about never really choosing his path but rather just bumping along it are quite raw and relevant to many of us. In addition, Stegner’s language and descriptions of their current and past environments and actions are exquisite.  It’s quite easy to understand why this book won the National Book Award when it was published.  This reader’s advice:  read and savor. 

The Midnight Library

By Matt Haig

Published 2020

Read Oct 2021

The genre into which these novel falls isn’t obvious—not science fiction nor speculative fiction by this reader’s definition but certainly requiring the reader to accept an interesting premise.  In this case the premise is that when at least some people are about to die, they enter a library of alternate lives.  For the main character, Nora, the library looks like the library in her school and is maintained by Mrs. Elm, the school librarian.  For another character, the library is of DVDs in a DVD store.  Regardless, the person of interest is confronted with a large number of alternate lives that would have been (or are actually?) had they made a different decision at some point in their life.

Nora’s “root life” is miserable—she’s out of a job; her cat has just died; her parents have passed; she is estranged from her brother; and she has just broken off an engagement days before the planed wedding. She just wants to die and has taken excessive anti-depressants and washed them down with alcohol.  But she wakes up in the library with Mrs. Elm who tells her she can try out an alternative life.  If it doesn’t work out, she will automatically return to the library and can try another.  Mrs. Elm suggests Nora look at her Book of Regrets to help her decide which decision she’d like to have been different which will pick the alternate life she will start leading. 

Nora has many regrets including: dropping out of competitive swimming despite the possibility of becoming an Olympic star; quitting the band she is in with her brother just as they are close to being signed by a record company; breaking off the engagement with her fiancée; not following her dream to become an artic geoscientist.  The book follows Nora through a number of alternate lives.  An interesting aspect of this is that Nora brings only her current memories and knowledge with her so she doesn’t hold the history of becoming, for instance, a PhD geoscientist and the academic papers she wrote in this life.  So part of Nora’s immediate attention in the alternate life is to figure out what she knows and has done—easier in some cases than others.  It’s also not clear what happens to the Nora she displaces when she tries out this alternate life.  The reader just needs to accept and move on.  This reader was willing.

Some reviewers have complained that the story is told “straight line” and too simply.  That Nora’s story is just a vehicle to discuss alternate universe theory and provide some therapy to the reader.  That the story isn’t quite dark enough, Nora’s character not engaging enough, etc.  This reader reads lots of dark, complex novels, some of which tend to reach for complexity without finding the point of that complexity.  So, this reader quite appreciated the “simplicity” of this book and its interesting material, some of which is, frankly, therapeutic for readers of a certain age that wonder “what if”. While “simple” and “straight line” , it did provide this reader, at least, a number of things to consider while Nora is working through alternate lives and deciding whether or not she really wants to die—or not.