Category: Books

By Carolyn Williams

Staff Writer

Only an elegant novel can combine an overwhelming love and a horrifying genocide without becoming unbelievable, but Kim Echlin’s “The Disappeared” makes it look easy.

Anne Greves is a 16-year-old student living in 1979 Montreal when she meets Serey. Her mother deceased, she lives with her father, an engineer of prosthetic limbs, but they operate at a distance. This loneliness prompts Anne to begin a habit of frequenting nightclubs, escaping via the blues music she loves.

There she encounters Serey, a Cambodian musician five years her senior. The two date and form a bond that will come to defy societal norms and become the cornerstone of Anne’s life. Despite her father’s disapproval, Anne dates Serey, boldly living with him on weekends, and hanging around his band, whose name is aptly lifted from Sartre’s famous play “No Exit.”

Serey is himself trapped. He was already studying at a university in the safety of Canada when the Khmer Rouge’s reign of terror began in Cambodia. Left with only a yellowing photo of his family and his father’s last telegram warning him not to come home, Serey is wracked by worry and survivor’s guilt. He falls in love with Anne as an exile and inevitably has to leave her when the Cambodian borders open.

But it is too late for Anne to turn back. She lives a life of apparent normalcy. She attends university, later becoming a professor of languages herself, but in truth she is hollowed out. She feels Serey’s absence, the danger of life in so unstable a country as post-genocidal Cambodia and her many unreturned letters and phone calls acutely. As a way of bringing herself closer to him, Anne studies the Khmer language, perfecting it. She rents his old apartment, unintentionally wallowing in memories of their past. Eleven years have passed when, watching the news, she believes she finally sees Serey, standing in the crowd at a memorial service. Without hesitation, she buys her plane ticket.

Upon her arrival in Phnom Penh, Anne gruelingly spends her nights searching nightclub after nightclub, until, at last, she and Serey are reunited. Unfortunately, their love cannot outweigh the residue of horror left to the recovering country. Anne’s narration of her time in Cambodia contains equal parts horror and history. Despite the atrocities, she maintains her unflinching love for Serey and manages to convey to he audience the beauty of the people, the culture, struggling to repair the irreversible damage done.

Anne and Serey fall into the familiar rhythm of quotidian existence, but something is off. After the stillborn birth of their daughter, Anne begins to suspect Serey of becoming detached. And when he disappears, Anne would do anything to get him back.

Echlin evokes something of Marguerite Duras’s style in “The Disappeared,” besides the similarity of a romantic relationship between a Western girl and an older Asian lover. Anne narrates from a future without Serey, turning the story into an extended love letter, addressing him throughout as “you,” pouring her grief and her longing for him into their story, her lasting tribute to their love. The eloquence of Echlin’s writing and the real, raw feelings of her narrator makes “The Disappeared” a truly moving read.

By Carolyn Williams

Staff Writer

Helen Simonson’s first novel, “Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand” captures with perfect aplomb the struggle between reverence for the tried and true and the indefatigable powers of change. Major Ernest Pettigrew (a 68-year-old resident of Edgecombe St. Mary, Sussex) is forced to face this challenge head-on, shaking things up just when he thought that his life had settled into the quiet rhythm of old age.

Major Pettigrew has just received word that his brother has passed away, news which is both personally saddening and a forceful reminder of his own mortality. He is physically rattled by his grief when he happens across the recently widowed Mrs. Ali. Despite the Major’s qualms about sharing his family’s business with a stranger, he finds himself talking to Mrs. Ali, a local shopkeeper and one of the only Muslim women in town. The two discuss their late spouses and their love of Kipling, forming an immediate bond of friendship which quickly develops into something more.

The Major is generally dissatisfied with the direction in which his town—and on a more macrocosmic level, the world—is moving. He is a man of principles, and to see them shattered by the local townspeople’s greed his contemporaries’ disrespect for the traditions he continues to live by and his shallow son Roger’s social climbing is a trial even for Major Pettigrew’s stiff upper lip. Mrs. Ali is a woman of immense tact and understanding, which the Major appreciates, but the townsfolk begin to whisper nonetheless.

Meanwhile, the Pettigrew family is in the midst of a serious debate over a pair of rare Churchill guns, passed down to the Major and his late brother by their father. The Major is adamant about maintaining the guns as part of the family’s legacy, but the younger generation is equally invested in selling them for a profit. Caught between tradition and the wishes of the rest of the family, the Major realizes that his son has fallen far short of his well-meant, but somewhat antiquated, expectations, and that his own motivations in wanting the gun might be somewhat questionable as well.

Everything comes to an unpleasant head when the town golf club, white members only, of course, decides to show their cultural acceptance by hosting a woefully tacky and inevitably offensive “Mughal Empire”-themed event. The Major turns heads when he invites Mrs. Ali, for whom he is steadily developing serious romantic inclinations. Things go horribly awry on all counts, and the remainder of the book deals with the fallout from the ill-fated dinner party.

“Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand” is thoroughly enjoyable from beginning to end. Simonson’s smart prose gives her work the feel of a novel of manners to make Jane Austen proud. The Major himself is a perfect construction of tact, intractability and wonderfully sarcastic dry humor. The blossoming romance between the major and Mrs. Ali is artfully done without becoming crude or unbelievable. Simonson’s commentary on societal changes and the challenges of small town thinking is apt, making “Major Pettigrew” a force to be reckoned with.

By Carolyn Williams

Staff Writer

Jamie Ford’s first novel, “Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet” is an endearing story of young love divided by familial differences. The only problem is, we’ve all heard this same story before, and Ford’s rendition does little to improve the careworn motif.

The book begins in 1986 Seattle, several months after the death of Henry Lee’s wife. He is learning to cope with his loneliness in quiet comfort, but a chance occurrence serves to bring back long-avoided questions regarding Henry’s first love.

The hotel of the title is the real Panama Hotel, and as Henry walks by one day, he happens across the discovery of a generation of Japanese families’ most precious possessions, entrusted to the hotel for safekeeping during their wartime internment and left untouched for 40 years. The unexpected appearance of this time capsule plunges Henry back into memories of his childhood and his long-lost first love.

Twelve year-old Henry Lee is struggling with the challenges of growing up Chinese in America. His father, a fanatical Chinese nationalist, has forbidden Henry to speak anything but English, creating a nearly insurmountable language barrier between Henry and his Cantonese-speaking parents. These same parents are extremely proud to tell their friends that their only son is the beneficiary of a scholarship to an all-white elementary school, carefully overlooking the fact that his Chinese contemporaries refuse to speak to him, and he usually evinces signs of physical bullying at the hands of his white classmates. Through all this, Henry maintains a sort of aloof calm, indulging only his love of jazz music as an escape from the unpleasantness of his day-to-day existence. But, of course, everything changes when a new girl arrives at school.

Said new girl is the precocious Keiko Okabe, who, despite her Japanese heritage, proudly refers to herself as an American. Like Henry, Keiko comports herself with a maturity unexpected in someone her age, and the two form an immediate bond as the only scholarship children at their school. Henry is petrified that his bigoted father will discover his friendship with a Japanese girl and goes to great lengths to keep their relationship a secret. Keiko tries gently to impart some of her own self-confidence in Henry, teaching him that his parents’ history is only part of the person he can become.

Inevitably, Keiko’s very happy Japanese-American family is shipped off to an internment camp, and the young Henry is distraught. Daring his family’s disapproval, he makes multiple illicit visits while they are being held in a nearby interim camp, but as the family is relocated, he and Keiko are truly separated, and their burgeoning love is tested.

As is typical in stories built around the “Romeo and Juliet” archetype of forbidden love, “Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet” speaks to love’s power to overcome the tests of distance and time. However, Ford’s characters hardly command the attention and respect of their audience in the way their precursors do, and the book falls flat.

By Carolyn Williams

Staff Writer

Eleanor Brown’s debut novel, “The Weird Sisters,” attempts to bring the language of and love for Shakespeare to a more mainstream audience. The title is an allusion to the witches of “Macbeth,” and the connections do not end there.

The story revolves around the lives of the three grown Andreas sisters. Their father, a professor specializing in Shakespeare at a small liberal arts college in Ohio, has named them each after one of the Bard’s heroines, and each suffers under the weight of her namesake’s legacy. The eldest, Rosalind (“As You Like It”), feels enormous pressure to find her Orlando. Although she is happily engaged to a fellow professor, she balks at the idea of change, hating the notion of feeling unneeded after a lifetime of being responsible. She leaps at the opportunity afforded by their mother’s newfound breast cancer to move back in and care for her. She must eventually face her fear of moving outside of her own comfort zone or lose her fiancé.

The second sister, Bianca (“The Taming of the Shrew”), called Bean by her family, has no trouble finding a date but realizes that her glittering New York City life is empty when she is abruptly fired from her job on grounds of financial fraud. A failure, she slinks back home, making the excuse of helping the family when she is in actuality licking her wounds and attempting to extricate herself from the crushing dual burden of her debt and her guilt.

The youngest of the three is predictably named after King Lear’s favorite daughter Cordelia and is called Cordy. She is a lovable college dropout, nearing 30 but still following bands and living a carefree nomadic lifestyle until she realizes she has accidentally become pregnant. Never having dealt with any real repercussions for her irresponsibility, she too returns home under the guise of helping her mother cope, while really seeking solace and guidance for herself.

Throughout Brown’s novel, the family members quote Shakespeare back and forth to each other, alluding to the works in a way which, though certainly clever, eventually becomes tiresome. Though Brown clearly has a firm grasp of the Bard’s vernacular, the overall effect feels somewhat forced. The book’s plot, simple enough that it should work well, is tired and, at times, unbelievably cliché. As Bean chases a married man, Rose obsesses over the idea that her family may not need her as much as she needs them, and Cordy falls conveniently in love with a local businessman she knows from her college days who is fine with dating a pregnant woman.

“The Weird Sisters” is by no means a bad book, but at times it suffers from its constant internal comparisons to Shakespeare’s works. Still, Brown delivers a diverting read and, as expected, all’s well that end’s well by the novel’s finish.

By Carolyn Williams

Staff Writer

Maggie O’Farrell’s fifth book, “The Hand That First Held Mine,” artfully melds two stories into one elegant novel: the first the history of Lexie Sinclair, a young woman blossoming in postwar London; the second that of Elina and Ted, a young couple introduced just after the birth of their first child, set fifty years after Lexie’s story.

Lexie makes her entrance in a burst of passion while fighting with her mother in rural Devon. After having been politely asked to leave her university, Lexie is displeased to find herself returned to the stagnation of her childhood home, bogged down by whining siblings and her patently boring life. Luckily for her, at this precise moment, the dashing, flamboyantly-attired Innes Kent appears, his car having broken down nearby. He immediately likes Lexie, and his well-timed arrival imbues Lexie with the courage to escape the stifling mediocrity ascribed to her in Devon. Without much of a plan, Lexie packs a bag and heads off to London, much to her family’s disapprobation, but with the promise of guidance from the intriguing Innes.

Lexie soon joins Innes in his work in bohemian Soho, where he edits an up-and-coming art magazine. Lexie’s natural vivacity and pert opinions make her a promising art critic, while her burgeoning love for Innes grows into a committed relationship, despite his estranged wife and frightening daughter. Lexie’s chapters, which interchange with those of Elina and Ted, are full of passion and an intangible gusto for life, which is somewhat dampened by the fact (made known early on) that she will die young. Still, Lexie’s adventurous zeal prevails, making her the undeniable star of the show, despite the bittersweet knowledge that she must die before the story ends.

Meanwhile, in contemporary London, Elina struggles with the aftereffects of the traumatic, botched delivery of her newborn son. A Norwegian painter, Elina wakes without any memory of the birth, which lasted several days and nearly killed her. Her apparent amnesia surrounding the event terrifies her pragmatic boyfriend, Ted, a film editor, prone to memory blackouts himself. As the days crawl by, Elina reacquaints herself with the day-to-day proceedings of her life, gradually beginning to remember the delivery, regaining strength and familiarizing herself with her new role as a mother.

Ted, however, is plagued by a sudden onset of alien memories which he cannot place. These memories, most of them triggered by interactions with his son, make little sense in the context of his life. Together, Ted and Elina begin to piece together the fragments of Ted’s early childhood, which, it becomes clear, is hardly what it has always seemed. Their search causes their current story to collide with the past, and, of course, with the long-dead Lexie, in an explosive “Aha” moment which leaves everyone reeling.

O’Farrell’s writing nears poetry, challenging the reader from the moment of Lexie’s first entrance. However, once accustomed to the style and pace of the prose, readers will find the story hard to put down. “The Hand That First Held Mine” is a very satisfying read, which, happily, never compromises artistry for story, because it simply does not need to.

By Carolyn Williams

Staff Writer

The title character of “Mathilda Savitch” begins her narrative stating: “I want to be awful. I want to do awful things and why not? Dull is dull is dull is my life.” With that promising beginning, poet and playwright Victor Lodato’s debut novel embarks on a refreshing and unforgettable 300 pages.

Things are not going well in Mathilda Savitch’s life as the novel begins. The year before, her older sister, the beautiful and perfect Helene, was run over by a train, effectively shattering Mathilda’s family. As a young adolescent grappling with grief and a desperate need for normalcy, Mathilda resolves to shock her parents out of their despondency using the tactic of bad behavior.

Mathilda’s actions like breaking plates, flirting with boys, getting new haircuts and, worst of all, dressing in Helene’s clothes on the anniversary of her death, all irritate her parents, but Mathilda remains unsatisfied. She soon realizes that simply getting her parents’ attention is not enough. She watches in disgust as her mother takes a leave of absence from the school where she works so she can devote more time to her worsening alcoholism, and her father sags deeper and deeper into the loss of his child. Mathilda decides to act out further.

After numerous attempts, Mathilda guesses the password to her sister’s e-mail account and attempts to learn more about the last days of the sister she continues to hero-worship, despite the growing evidence that Helene was not really what she seemed. Communicating with ex-boyfriends as Helene, Mathilda begins to piece together what really happened and is forced to admit that even Helene was not the idol she had always thought her to be; maybe she was not pushed off the platform by a faceless stranger as Mathilda has convinced herself and her readers, maybe she never knew her sister as well as she thought, maybe Helene jumped. And, most importantly, Mathilda realizes that masquerading as her dead older sister is not going to solve her own disconcerting emotional issues.

Mathilda tempers her mourning with humor and an almost savagely blunt analysis of the people around her. Lodato has rendered her voice brilliantly, maintaining the youthfulness of a child’s mind without sounding like he’s trying too hard. Fierce and funny, Mathilda is clearly a cousin of Salinger’s Holden Caulfield, both in her speech and even more so in her behavior as the book progresses, but their situations are distinctly different. Mathilda is growing up in the modern age of terror, and the looming shadows and troubling mindset belonging to today distance her from Caulfield’s New York exploits. Although it will probably never be held in the same esteem as its predecessor, “Mathilda Savitch” is “The Catcher in the Rye” for the present moment, and the outlook is a frightening one.

By Carolyn Williams

Staff Writer

“The Bad Girl” is first and foremost a shameless love story. Ricardo Somocurcio, the story’s narrator and protagonist, falls in love as a teenager in his childhood home of Miraflores, an upscale district of Lima, Peru. The object of his affection is a young Chilean named Lily, recently arrived on the scene, and before Ricardo can convince her to go steady, she vanishes from his life.

Years later, Ricardo finds himself a young expatriate in France, working as a translator for UNESCO, focusing all his energies on making his youthful ambition of a quiet life in Paris a reality. Suddenly the arrival of Comrade Arlette, a Peruvian revolutionary stopping over briefly in Paris before moving on to Cuba for further training, turns Ricardo’s humble world upside down. Although she denies it, Comrade Arlette is Lily, the purported Chilean of Ricardo’s youth. Again, Ricardo declares his love, this time for the unwilling revolutionary, and after favoring him with a few dates, she inevitably flits out of his life again.

From then on, Ricardo is cursed to love no one but the bad girl, a woman of irresistible charm and beauty, whose true identity remains shrouded in a complex web of lies and deceptions. Each time she meets him, she has reincarnated herself, capitalizing on rich men to catapult herself higher into society, and only when she is in between wealthy patrons does she turn to Ricardo, her fellow compatriot, lover and the single constant which transcends her many lives. At times Ricardo regards her with contempt and hatred, but in his heart he knows he will never escape his love for the bad girl.

Each chapter of “The Bad Girl” acts as a separate story. They follow a sort of pattern, in which Ricardo is living a normal life, seeing other women, interacting with friends, when the bad girl makes a sudden, shocking reappearance. Each time he encounters her, an exasperated Ricardo finds his love has increased, and for forty years, the pair play a game of cat and mouse across several continents.

“The Bad Girl” can be compared to Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary” in that the bad girl can be called a cheekier, modernized version of Emma, and Ricardo, the good boy, as the bad girl always called him, is comparable to Charles Bovary, Emma’s simple, trusting husband. In spite of Emma’s philandering and other outrageous behavior, Charles always welcomes her back with open arms, as does Ricardo, until their bad girls die.

Mario Vargas Llosa, one of Latin America’s foremost writers, is responsible for having written a large body of work and his efforts have recently been rewarded: he is the 2010 Nobel Prize laureate for literature. The Peruvian author, politician, journalist and essayist is best known for such works as “The Time of the Hero,” “The Green House” and “Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter.” He is also notorious for his feud with Colombian writer and fellow Nobel Prize laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The two have maintained a resolute silence for more than 30 years, since Vargas Llosa famously punched Garcia Marquez in the face in Mexico City, according to www.kirjasto.sci.fi. The reason behind the schism has never been revealed. “The Bad Girl” is Vargas Llosa’s latest work.

By Carolyn Williams

Writer

Barbara Kingsolver’s renowned novel “The Poisonwood Bible” is essentially risky. Though the book received critical acclaim, garnering New York Times bestseller status and becoming Editors’ Choice for the New York Times Book Review, it has received mixed popular reviews from the moment it hit stores in 1998. It continues to be somewhat controversial more than 10 years later.

The story follows the Price family for about 30 years, beginning with their move from small-town America to the Belgian Congo in 1959, a much-anticipated part of their father Nathan’s missionary work. Orleanna and her four daughters are the narrators, and each infuses her own personality and point of view into her narration, forcing the reader to carefully consider the speaker’s reliability.

Rachel, the oldest daughter, is shallow and vapid. Leah, next, is idealistic and eager to please. Adah, Leah’s twin, detaches herself from the rest of the world, hiding behind her crooked body. Ruth May, the baby, is the most courageous of all, with a contagious vivacity. Orleanna, their mother, narrates from the future, her narration interspersed with the girls’ stories. Her memories are heavy with guilt and regret for what has happened to her family.

Tensions mount in their Congolese village, and it becomes clear these small troubles are a microcosm of the changes in the Congo itself during its struggle for independence. Under the weight of these upheavals, the Price family is torn apart. Nathan’s religious fervor moves to such a level of fanaticism that he refuses to move his family back to America and vows to stay in the Congo until he believes God’s work there is done.

Some of the daughters remain in Africa for the rest of their lives, and others return to America, but all are irrevocably changed by their time in the village of Kilanga.

Much of the reason “The Poisonwood Bible” has come under fire is the depiction of Nathan Price. The Baptist minister is so fiercely dedicated to converting the village to Christianity that he alienates his entire congregation and jeopardizes and mistreats his wife and daughters. He seems to lose touch with reality completely. The religious title of the book, Nathan’s actions and several of the daughters’ subsequent losses of faith have caused some readers to label Kingsolver’s work as hateful and disgraceful.

In reality, demonizing Christians is not Kingsolver’s intent in “The Poisonwood Bible.” The book is about ignorance, and much of the ignorance Kingsolver highlights is that which the Prices bring with them into the Congolese jungle. The most poignant instance of the theme is demonstrated through Nathan’s ignorance of the nuances of the Lingala language spoken in Kilanga, and, more significantly, his ignorance of mankind in general. He continually mispronounces the word bangala, which he intends to mean beloved, but with his incorrect inflection, he is actually ending his services with the confusing, disconcerting statement “Jesus is Poisonwood Tree.”

By Brenna English-Loeb

Senior Writer

Booker Prize Winner Kazuo Ishiguro (for his 1989 “The Remains of the Day“) has come to the fore of the literary scene once more with his striking “Never Let Me Go.” Ishiguro’s delicate, precise prose is again at work with his trademark style of novels based on reminiscence. The memories of Kathy H. flow from one scene to another practically seamlessly, transporting the reader through her short life, each scene raising just as many questions as it answers about Kathy’s strange world. “Never Let Me Go” moves along so swiftly, readers will be totally engrossed and wish to finish the novel in one sitting.

It is hard to give even a brief account of “Never Let Me Go” without giving away one of the novel’s integral conditions, but the slow realization of this specific plot point is part of what makes the work so masterful. Kathy H. tells the dreamlike and somewhat disjointed story of her youth growing up at Hailsham, a boarding school-esque establishment in England in the 90s. She has two very important friends from Hailsham, Ruth and Tommy, who grow together and learn to navigate harsh realities of their situation. The unsettling conceit is that Kathy, Ruth and Tommy’s experience of the world is not quite like ours, though it is parallel to it.

The characters of the three protagonists are revealed in poignant episodes without being obviously sentimental. There are several influential teachers at Hailsham, notably Miss Lucy and Miss Emily, who have a somewhat ambivalent role in the protagonists‘ lives and yet also remain sympathetic.

Part of Ishiguro’s success with his characterization stems from the solid background of this parallel world he has created. Every detail is specific and meaningful, full of a personal lore deeply entrenched in his main character’s personality. Sometimes, due to the limitations brought on by the first person narrative, the reader can wish for more concrete information rather than passing remarks.The world Ishiguro has created is clearly a rich one, but somehow it remains outside the complete grasp of the reader’s comprehension, somewhat frustratingly mirroring Kathy’s own incomplete understanding.

Ishiguro does not weigh down his prose with pages of exposition, which greatly aids the novel’s flow.Ishiguro successfully avoids the pitfalls of many dystopian novels where characters improbably attempt to lead a cultural revolution. Kathy, Ruth and Tommy do not try to do any such thing. They just try to live.

“Never Let Me Go” has recently been adapted into a movie, directed by Mark Romanek and starring Carey Mulligan as Kathy, Keira Knightley as Ruth and Andrew Garfield as Tommy.