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Olive Again!

By Elizabeth Strout

Published 2019

Read Nov 2019

This reader finds the title somewhat unfortunate as it suggested this should be read as a second installment about Olive Kitteridge.  However, this reader believes the thirteen stories in this volume allow a person unfamiliar with Olive Kitteridge or her neighbors and friends to participate fully in her world of Crosby during this period of her life.

Strout masterfully, thoughtfully, and empathetically creates a picture of Olive from shortly after the death her husband, Henry, of four plus  decades, through the next ten years—from about age 75 to 85.  Most of the other characters are also in this approximate age group or at least nearing retirement. 

The book opens with a story about Jack Kennison and so introduces us to this man who will eventually become Olive’s second husband.     We learn the circumstances leading to his move with (now deceased) wife Betsy to Crosby, Maine.  Jack was initially asked to take some time away from Harvard following an accusation of sexual harassment.  Jack acknowledges to us an affair with a younger faculty member and that he eventually voted against her tenure, along with other members of the department.  The school settles with the woman and Jack retires.  He and Betsy move to Crosby, Maine to be away from all of that.  We learn he and Betsy had married decades previously when both were on the rebound from failed relationships.  Their marriage wasn’t a classic “happy” one, although they had enjoyed many happy times.  He now misses Betsy deeply, even after he learns that she had carried on an affair with a former boyfriend for some period of time during their marriage.  We learn their only child, a now middle aged daughter, came out to them as a lesbian.  This revelation fractured the relationship between father and daughter although not apparently that of mother and daughter.  Jack is wrestling with all of this and then manages to get stopped for speeding, an incident that doesn’t go smoothly.

Thus in a matter of twenty-one pages that comprise the opening story, the stage is set for viewing scenes of people facing their past choices, both good and bad, for missing lost spouses regardless of the happiness of their time together, for regretting lost opportunities for better relationships with their spouse and with their children, for dealing with bodies that are losing capabilities, for having medical issues, and for trying to avoid loneliness as their world is changing in ways they can’t control.  The stories are sober, lovely, refreshing, and occasionally uplifting.

Olive misses Henry terribly and Jack misses Betsy similarly but sharing this grief openly is something that initially brings them together.  They are both wiser and more mature than when they married their long-term spouses so they are pleased and feel lucky that they can turn arguments into long useful discussions.  Jack can tell Olive he loves her for who she is but sometimes it would be helpful if she was a little less Olive with him.  Olive tells us she feels Henry was her first husband but Jack is her real husband.  Jack comments to us through the narrator that Olive has become less anxious after they’ve been married for a while and he is very happy about this.

After Jack dies Olive faces life alone again, this time in Jack’s house which no longer feels like theirs.  Now Strout explores more deeply the lives of single older people and the paths that they never thought they would need to take as their ability to “safely live” alone degrades.  Strout is remarkably articulate and sincere as she has Olive face issues such as “those foolish diapers for old people” and staying in independent living versus being sent “over the bridge” to the other part of the “retirement” facility. 

Strout’s pictures of Olive’s relationship with her son, Christopher, were remarkably vivid for this reader.  Christopher is now a successful podiatrist in New York City and lives there with his second wife, her two children from two previous relationships, and their own two children, the older of which is named Henry for his grandfather.  They have never been to Olive’s home before this story’s three day visit.  The first night, after the daughter-in-law and children have gone to bed, Chris and Olive sit and talk in Olive’s living room, or more accurately, Olive listens as Chris talks.  “Olive didn’t care what he talked about. … On and on he talked, her son.  Olive was tired but stifled a yawn.  She would stay here forever to hear this.  He could recite the alphabet to her and she would sit here and listen to it.”  But of course the high hopes Olive has for the visit, although she has no idea how to really prepare for the invasion of all these children into her house, aren’t met.  Chris takes poorly the news of Olive and Jack’s impending marriage   Olive realizes her family isn’t like others—those where children come to visit with their children and everyone laughs and is happy.  She now thinks about their time, Henry, Olive and Chris, in the house Henry and Olive had built and that is now torn down for a new build, “never , ever realizing that she herself had been raising a motherless child, now a long, long way from home.” 

Some stories bring in characters from other Strout books.  She provides a story in which Jim Burgess and wife Helen, long-term residents of New York City, visit Jim’s brother, Bob, and his second wife who live in Crosby.  The Burgess Boys brothers visit their sister, Susan in nearby Shirley Falls.  Olive becomes friends with Isabelle from Isabelle and Amy.  No familiarity with either book is required to appreciate these stories (this reader can accurate attest to this as she has not read Isabelle and Amy) and their relevant themes.  Strout is very gifted in her ability to create characters “on the spot” in short stories and later pick them up and continue their story elsewhere, requiring nothing from the reader except their interest in engaging with them. 

Olive isn’t a central character or even a peripheral one in all the stories.  “The End of Civil War Days”, in eleven pages, dives into the lives of an estranged couple still living together thirty-five years after Fergus’s affair (because “back then there was no forgiveness and no divorce”).  An annual visit from their older daughter from New York City throws their lives into turmoil as they try to understand her chosen profession.  “Cleaning” is about a high-school aged girl living in an apartment with her depressed and emotionally distant widowed mother.  Shortly before his death, her father had confided that she had been his favorite child while her sister was her mother’s favorite child.  The girl cleans houses for several Crosby residents and we learn about her relationships with her clients.  Strout gives us an interesting story of someone who just wants to be seen and valued by someone. 

The photo associated with this blog was chosen because Olive reflects on her life several times in this volume.  She considers her behaviors with husband Henry, son Chris, and husband Jack.  She sometimes understands herself or her motivations but often she doesn’t.  Strout doesn’t tie up loose ends for the reader nor answers for us the questions Olive asks about herself. 

When Strout was asked in an interview whether Olive might reappear again, for instance in a book about becoming Olive, Strout indicated she didn’t think so, but she couldn’t fully know that.  This reader is content with this being the last book about Olive but this reader will also continue reading Strout’s work and hopes it will continue in this form—somewhat connected and extremely rich stories that provide scenes in people’s lives that shed light on universal topics and  themes we don’t always expect to explore but are glad when we do. 

Hum if You Don’t Know the Words

By Bianca Marais

Published 2017

Read Dec 2019

 June 16, 1976, Robin is a white nine-year old girl living in Boksburg, Johannesburg, South Africa  with her parents and her imaginary twin sister.  Her parents are killed that evening while (black) maid Mabel babysits.  Police come to her home and take her and Mabel to the police station.  Mabel is questioned by the police and leaves abruptly.  Aunt Edith, her mother’s sister, picks her up from the police station.  Both Robin and Edith’s lives are thrown into turmoil as they try to deal with the loss of Robin’s parents and how Edith, an international flight attendant with no intentions of being a parent, will care for her niece.

On June 14, 1976 Beauty Mbali, an educated black woman living in rural Transkei, South Africa (an area later set aside by South Africa as a homeland for Xhosa-speaking people, recognized as an independent country by South Africa then reabsorbed into South Africa), receives word from her brother that Beauty’s daughter, who is living with him in Soweto, Johannesburg, South Africa while going to high school, is in trouble.  Beauty leaves her two sons at home to search for her daughter.  On June 16, 1976, between 10,000 and 20,000 black students protest a recent decree requiring Afrikaans, versus their indigenous language, be the language used for teaching.  Beauty learns her daughter is a leader from her school in this uprising.  Her life is turned upside down as she seeks a means to find her daughter and take her home.

Through Marias’ novel the reader become acquainted with a number of apartheid laws under which black live during this period.  Among them, the requirement that blacks carry passbooks, that they must have clearance to be in an area outside their home district, and that is illegal for a black person to sleep in a white person’s home.    Robin has been raised with other aspects of this culture including the requirement that Mabel use only a designated toilet and that whites don’t eat or drink from dishes used by blacks. 

The stories of their days just before the uprising through approximately a year later are told through chapters told by either Robin or Beauty.  The author’s rendering of each character’s voice is convincing.

Of course these two characters are brought together to partly mitigate the turmoil in their lives.  Beauty is hired to care for Robin (also not quite legal as she can only be a maid, not a caregiver, and certainly not one that sleeps in their apartment) while Aunt Edith is doing her job for the airline.  Beauty gets a passbook and a stamp allowing her to be in Aunt Edith’s district and to travel to and from her home for visits.  An organization supporting the demise of apartheid is a key component enabling this situation.   The novel gives some perspective of the risks the organization’s member assume to press their beliefs of injustice of the system. 

A few other characters, friends and neighbors of Aunt Edith, are needed for the story as they fill gaps for Robin’s care when neither Beauty nor Aunt Edit is available.  The author uses this opportunity to inform the reader of the laws against homosexuality and that anti-Semitism is rampant.  Robin is, of course, confused by these prejudices as the Goldmans and Victor and his friends seem completely normal and unworthy of any contempt by anyone.  Again, Robin’s nine year-old voice is believable and can conveniently provide some teaching.

The story has a good amount of suspense as Beauty pursues many avenues to find her daughter.    Robin gets in the investigative act as well since she’s enamored by a detective series she reads and can effectively plot with the Goldman boy to provide her cover.  It is interesting that Robin is allowed to walk home from school and take care of herself until dinner-time, sometimes, when Beauty can’t be there while she’s following a thread that might lead her to her daughter.  The complete helicopter parent routine of our current culture hadn’t fully invaded Robin’s neighborhood yet. 

Beauty wonders “what quality of freedom be if it is won with blood.”  She worries that violent uprising will poison its participants, eliminating their ability to do the difficult post-revolution work in a peaceful manner.  She has a point. 

The book is engaging.  It gives the reader an opportunity to learn more about this period in South African history and provides some very useful perspective regarding the apartheid-era in South Africa.  While we would like to think that the United States “got past” these kinds of irrational and abusive laws and customs through our own brutal Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement, it does give readers pause as to whether or not that is truly the case.   Similarly it’s not clear neither the United States nor any other political entity has evolved beyond the use of force to win its battles for what it sees as “right”.

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous:  A Novel

By Ocean Vuong

Published 2019

Read Dec 2019

Vuong uses, as the structure for his novel,  a long letter from the narrator to his mother when he is 28, after the narrator has graduated from college and progressed beyond his origins.  He starts with a series of incidents indicating that his mother routinely used corporal punishment.  In the first chapter he implies his mother suffered from PTSD and this was a partial driver for her hitting him.  In this first chapter he agrees with his mother that she is not a monster, but also says this is a lie.  He then  explains that a monster “is not such a terrible thing to be.”  “A monster is “to be a hybrid signal, a lighthouse; both a shelter and warning at once.”  He ends the chapter with a message to his mother that he is a monster too “which is why I can’t turn away from you.  Which is why I have taken god’s loneliest creation and put you inside it. “

The narrator doesn’t tell us then why he is a monster but this reader assumed we would learn he is gay.  How that makes him a shelter and a warning at once is not so clear then nor frankly, for this reader, later.  Vuong’s language is certainly sometimes gorgeous.  “But the work [on a tobacco farm near Hartford, CT} somehow sutured a fracture inside me.  A work of unbreakable links and collaboration, each plant cut, picked, lifted, and carried from one container to another in such timely harmony that no stalk of tobacco, once taken from the soil, ever touches ground again.  A work of myriad communications, I learned to speak to the men not with my tongue, which was useless there, but with smiles, hand gestures, even silences, hesitations.”  His detailed and vivid language can only come from personal experience.  We believe what he says.  Unfortunately, this will eventually include his explicit descriptions of gay sex. 

This book is difficult to read.  Partly because of the explicit scenes of violence of mother upon son, of mother and son trying to calm schizophrenic grandma, of gay sex, and more. But also because the author invokes a style, for which this reader does not know the name, but has been encountered when reading heralded authors like Flannery O’Conner and Virginia Wolf.   It’s just plain hard to figure out what is going on at times.  

So this reader will attempt to list what might make the various characters briefly gorgeous.  The narrator’s grandmother as a young Vietnamese girl during the Vietnam War flees from her arranged marriage and is turned away from her mother’s house.  As a result, becomes pregnant by an unknown American soldier when she is earning her living on her back.  She meets a nice American soldier who is not a customer.  They fall in love, marry, and he accepts the boy as his own.  Unfortunately they become separated during the withdrawal of Americans from Vietnam.  But the couple is briefly gorgeous in their happiness and love.  The narrator’s mother, a struggling single mother, now in Hartford, CT, drags the young narrator and her mother through the streets late at night, trying s to find the right foodstuffs to make a traditional holiday meal.  Although she fails, the narrator understands the beauty of her desire.  Trevor, the narrator’s first love, is the most beautiful being the narrator can imagine during their summers of love.  Trevor doesn’t accept that his actions suggest he too is gay, but his response to their first “real fuck” (author’s language) show the narrator that he really must love him.  The narrator sees many gorgeous things and recounts them to us, in particular the beauty of the monarch butterflies and the triumph that is Tiger Woods, another many mixed-race young man who is deemed black by others and, so, his family.

This is certainly a book this reader wouldn’t choose to finish, but one this reader anticipates will become more gorgeous after the book discussion for which it is scheduled.  Thanks be to book discussions to drive us to expand our reading horizon. 

The Things They Carried

By Tim O’Brien

Published 1990

Read 2011; Dec 2019

This reader first encountered this book when the 20^th anniversary edition was published.  At the time, this reader was very impressed with the title story, the first in the book, and less satisfied by the remainder of the book.  However, several images from the first reading were ignited in memory during the second reading and this reader savored the entire offering this time.   

The title chapter remains a pivotal chapter.  O’Brien starts by describing personal items the soldiers carried (ie gum, photographs), then turns to the weapons and ammunition, and other combat equipment, delineating their weight.  By now the reader realizes the solider is pretty burdened and essentials such as raingear, a way to sleep, and clothing hadn’t been mentioned yet.  O’Brien includes these but then begins ratcheting things up—they carried foot rot, lice, the soil itself—and cranks further with feelings—thoughts of a girl (did she love him or not), fear—of the enemy, of not performing under fire, of not getting the medals expected by a father– and more.  The relentlessness of including more and more of what was carried draws the reader into the Vietnam foot soldier experience in a mere few pages in a more memorable way that any other story or film has done for this reader.  The reader is glad they didn’t have this experience personally but this reader realizes if so, they could never forget it even if they wanted to.  Touché.

This book has been described as “not a novel”.  It certainly isn’t that.  It has been described as a set of somewhat connected short stories.  This reader feels the better description is a set of essays, stories, and notes by the author serving to record the stories that are still in his head so that he may relieve himself of some burden of trying to remember them.  But he also shares his thoughts on what stories are, what they, mean, what they accomplish, and why we all need them to learn about others’ lives and to live our own.

O’Brien writes early in the book:  “forty-three years old and the war occurred half a life time ago, and yet the remembering makes it now.  And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever.  That’s what stories are for.  Stories are for joining the past to the future.  Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can’t remember how you got from where you were to where you are.  Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.”    Tim O’Brien give us a flavor of his experiences in a war he didn’t want to join but did to, according to his story “On the Rainy River”.  After several days spent trying to decide whether or not to cross the Minnesota/Canadian border he goes home “and then to Vietnam, where I was a solider, and then home again.  I survived, but it’s not a happy ending.  I was a coward.  I went to the war.”   This book helps us understand why he was never the same.

O’Brien gives us stories from a few angles sometimes about a particular incident and honesty tells us that perhaps none of the takes on this story are true.  O’Brien gives us an assessment of the stories told by Rat Kiley, the medic that helps O’Brien during his first wound:  “For Rat Kiley, I think, facts were formed by sensation, not the other way around, and when you listened to one of his stories, you’d find yourself performing rapid calculations in your head, subtracting superlatives, figuring the square root of an absolute, and then multiplying by maybe.”   So stories were important even then to make  it through the experience of a foot soldier in Vietnam, humping through the jungles of Vietnam with limited understand of why they were there, what their missions were supposed to accomplish, and with limited actual encounter with the enemy, but with lots of encounters with the sights and sounds of the humans and other inhabitants of this dense, hilly jungle. 

This reader especially appreciated the writing on this reading of the book.  O’Brien is superb in his descriptions.  Another example, this time citing “From “Night Life” describing night missions:  “No moon and no stars.  It was the purest black you could imagine, Sanders, said.  The kind of clock-stopping black that God must’ve had in mind when he sat down to invent blackness.”

We hear about the loss of the well-liked soldier Kiowa in a muddy shit field and the impact this had on the whole group.  Norman Bowher commits suicide in 1978, about ten years after his return.  Jimmy Connor, the commander keeps his men searching for the body against difficult odds of finding and certainly terrible circumstances being in that field again.  O’Brien returns to the shit field with his ten-year old daughter long after the fighting is over.  “Over the years, that coldness had never entirely disappeared.  There were times in my life when I couldn’t feel much, not sadness, or pity, or passion, and somehow I blamed this place for what I had become, and I blamed it for taking away the person I had once been.  For twenty years this field had embodied all the waste that was Vietnam, all the vulgarity and horror.  Now it was just what it was.  Flat and dreary and unremarkable.”

This reader appreciated the stories and notes he provides here about Vietnam as we can’t imagine it with any accuracy otherwise.  This reader applauds his language and thanks him for his raw insights and sharing.  O’Brien helped this reader to better understand the power of storytelling—how it helps get you through the unimaginable as well as “joining the past to the future…when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.”   Readers like this one realize that we all have need for stories to help us understand how we got from there to here, wherever that is. 

Antigone

 by Sophocles

Written ~440 BC

Home Fires

by Kamila Shamsie

Published 2017

Read Oct 2019

The Theban Legend of Oedipus King of Thebes and his family was well known before Sophocles wrote his Theban plays in the 5^th century BC. This reader was educated in the legend through Sophocle’s Theban plays.  This reader will not comment on Sophocle’s innovations or brilliance.  Others are far better positioned to do so.  This reader will only recount the overall plot of his first Theban play, Antigone.  

Before the play starts, the sons of disgraced Oedipus, Polyneices and Eteocles, have contended for the throne of Thebes, held by Creon, the brother of Oedipus’ widow and the person Oedipus charged to care for his children as he leaves for exile.  Polyneices has attacked the city of Thebes while Eteocles fought to defend it, supported by Creon.  The brothers have killed each other in direct face-to-face combat with each other.    Creon, again firmly in charge of Thebes, has proclaimed that Polyneices, because he attacked Thebes, will not be buried but will be left to rot and scavenged by carrions while Eteocles will be buried per customs.   The ruling against Polyneices is considered very harsh punishment.   

Oedipus’ daughter Antigone and Ismene differ with regards to their willingness to obey Creon’s proclamation.  Antigone declares her brother will be buried; Ismene promotes caution and is unwilling to war against the state.  Antigone executes some burial rites defying Creon.  She admits this to Creon and argues with Creon about the immorality of the edict and the morality of her own actions.  Antigone and her sister are taken away for punishment although Antigone indicates Ismene is innocent.   Creon’s son and Antigone’s finance, Haemon, arrives and initially indicates support for his father, suggesting he is turning against Antigone, but then argues for lenience for Antigone including that the people support Antigone’s actions.  After arguing, Haemon leaves, indicating he will never again see his father.  Creon decides to punish only Antigone and has her buried alive in a cave, to minimize wrath from the gods.  After interaction with a blind prophet, Creon eventually decides to reverse his decision and orders Antigone released.  Unfortunately Antigone has already hanged herself.  Haemon kills himself when he finds Antigone’s body.  Creon begins to blame himself for all that has happened but not soon enough as his wife, Haemon’s mother, has also committed suicide.   

In the acknowledgements to Home Fire, Kamila Shamsie tells us she took up a suggestion to adapt Antigone in a “contemporary context”.  This reader found her results stunning.  This writer has decided not to reveal details of the adaptation and leave that for readers to discover themselves.  However, this writer can indicate that the choices Shamsie made to exemplify Oedipus’s disgrace,  Polyneices’ crime against the state,  and the circumstances Creon creates for himself and his state allow us to experience the extreme situations that the ancient Greeks understood about the Theban Legend.  The choices force us to experience the terrible dilemmas the characters face and to realize the answers seem obvious but aren’t.   

Congratulations, Kamila Shamsie for enabling this reader to really understand the depth of the questions Antigone requires us to face. 

The Cuckoo’s Calling

Published 2013; Read Aug 2019

The Silkworm

Published 2014; Read Oct 2019

Career of Evil

Published 2015; Read Oct 2019

By Robert Galbraith

The Cuckoo’s Calling is the first in a series of detective novels featuring Coroman Strike and his temp, Robin, written by J.K. Rowling under the name Robert Galbraith.  This reader enjoyed these books while doing long distance driving for many of the same reasons she enjoyed listening to the Harry Potter series while driving:  the characters—both the “good guys” and the “bad guys” are richly drawn and well-rounded with positive and negative attributes; the characters make some bad decisions that lead to consequences they need to repair; the plot is engaging; the language is great.  The reader gets engaged in the personal story of the detective and his temp (later investigative partner) while the chase is on to solve the case of the specific book.  In Career of Evil, the case directly involves Robin and brings forward some perps from Coroman’s past.  The series is set in London and the daily routines and corresponding language and idioms fall nicely on the listener’s ear.   This reader looks forward to listening to the fourth book in the series and hopes J.K.  aka Robert will continue finding new adventures for this engaging and unlikely pair of investigators.