Sue Miller

Although this happened more when I was younger, I occasionally run into an author who so impresses me that I know I will read all of her work as soon as I can get hold of it. Sue Miller is just such an author.  I have now read all but one of her long list of excellent novels including her memoir of her father, The Story of My Father. The recurring themes in her novels had already convinced me that much of her fiction is autobiographical, and her memoir of her father solidified that conviction. It is as if she has stirred together a cauldron of her memories of her several marriages and her life as a parent, and then spills them out in the pages of her novels. The Arsonist, one of her latest novels, is as usual, a close description of the everyday life of her characters. While the title suggests it is a novel about arson, turns out that the arsons and the arsonist are of minor importance to Miller while the major theme is how relationships go wrong and occasionally go right. The Boston Globe says of this late novel, “Entertaining…Fantastic sizzle both sexual and spiritual.” While sexual sizzle is no longer an issue for me, the spiritual sizzle of her work hits me hard and stays with me. Many years ago I read and reviewed her first, and most famous novel, The Good Mother. And then, only this past summer did I pick up an early novel, While I Was Gone. Having just traveled to my home for a final visit with my last living sibling, and while there involved in an intense discussion with my oldest male friend about choosing death while still mobile and cognizant, I found myself arguing for life and possibility. My brother died while I was on the train coming home, and his death added to the impact the novel had on me. The heroine of the novel is married when she has kind of mystical experience in which she feels outside her life, indeed, outside her body. She then goes through a series of reflections on her life regarding her marriage and family. She wonders if she has chosen well, and begins a flirtation with an old lover which very nearly derails her marriage. What occurs is that she begins to think about alternate lives she might have lived and alternate relationships she might have pursued. In short, she considers all that seems bland and repetitive in her present life, and only at the last moment begins to realize all that is good about her family life and her life with her husband. It takes a shock and a crisis to jolt her into this new appraisal.Another of the recurring themes in her books is Alzheimer’s or other debilitating diseases. In The Story of My Father, she recounts the slow dissolution of her father as he struggles with and finally succumbs to the disease.  While the book is sad, Miller is brutally honest about her own feelings, her resentments mixed with fear and deep loyalty to her once brilliant, academic father.Although there are plots and story-lines, it is what happens in the interior life that really interests Miller and creates the spiritual sizzle of her words. While she has immense respect and admiration for her father’s intellectual pursuits, she also comes to realize how his intense interests in many ways distanced him from his wife and children.There was an impartiality, and therefore a distance, in even my father’s closest and most loving attention…I certainly knew him to be capable of forgetfulness of what to him seemed mundane or unimportant, and this occasionally included obligations he’d undertaken to one of us or to my mother…the nightmare side of living with someone whose first allegiance is elsewhere, is other worldly. You are left, you are abandoned. You have no real importance in the great scheme of things.So far I have said nothing about Miller’s conflicted relationship with her mother, and her self-doubts being a mother, who, like her father, needs huge amounts of time to write and reflect, too often to the detriment of her children.There is so much more to say about the complex emotional reflections of this brilliant author. I will content myself with a final comment about Miller’s unabashed love of men. Of course she is critical of the non-domesticity of many/most men, but her descriptions of her father and of the husbands in her novels leave no doubt that she admires so much about good men, good fathers.  Perhaps there is a book, The Good Father, in her future.

Although this happened more when I was younger, I occasionally run into an author who so impresses me that I know I will read all of her work as soon as I can get hold of it. Sue Miller is just such an author.  I have now read all but one of her long list of excellent novels including her memoir of her father, The Story of My Father.  The recurring themes in her novels had already convinced me that much of her fiction is autobiographical, and her memoir of her father solidified that conviction. It is as if she has stirred together a cauldron of her memories of her several marriages and her life as a parent, and then spills them out in the pages of her novels. The Arsonist, one of her latest novels, is as usual, a close description of the everyday life of her characters. While the title suggests it is a novel about arson, turns out that the arsons and the arsonist are of minor importance to Miller while the major theme is how relationships go wrong and occasionally go right.  The Boston Globe says of this late novel, “Entertaining…Fantastic sizzle both sexual and spiritual.” While sexual sizzle is no longer an issue for me, the spiritual sizzle of her work hits me hard and stays with me.  Many years ago I read and reviewed her first, and most famous novel, The Good Mother. And then, only this past summer did I pick up an early novel, While I Was Gone. Having just traveled to my home for a final visit with my last living sibling, and while there involved in an intense discussion with my oldest male friend about choosing death while still mobile and cognizant, I found myself arguing for life and possibility. My brother died while I was on the train coming home, and his death added to the impact the novel had on me. The heroine of the novel is married when she has kind of mystical experience in which she feels outside her life, indeed, outside her body. She then goes through a series of reflections on her life regarding her marriage and family. She wonders if she has chosen well, and begins a flirtation with an old lover which very nearly derails her marriage. What occurs is that she begins to think about alternate lives she might have lived and alternate relationships she might have pursued. In short, she considers all that seems bland and repetitive in her present life, and only at the last moment begins to realize all that is good about her family life and her life with her husband. It takes a shock and a crisis to jolt her into this new appraisal. Another of the recurring themes in her books is Alzheimer’s or other debilitating diseases. In The Story of My Father, she recounts the slow dissolution of her father as he struggles with and finally succumbs to the disease.  While the book is sad, Miller is brutally honest about her own feelings, her resentments mixed with fear and deep loyalty to her once brilliant, academic father. Although there are plots and story-lines, it is what happens in the interior life that really interests Miller and creates the spiritual sizzle of her words. While she has immense respect and admiration for her father’s intellectual pursuits, she also comes to realize how his intense interests in many ways distanced him from his wife and children.<blockquote>There was an impartiality, and therefore a distance, in even my father’s closest and most loving attention…I certainly knew him to be capable of forgetfulness of what to him seemed mundane or unimportant, and this occasionally included obligations he’d undertaken to one of us or to my mother…the nightmare side of living with someone whose first allegiance is elsewhere, is other worldly. You are left, you are abandoned. You have no real importance in the great scheme of things.</blockquote>So far I have said nothing about Miller’s conflicted relationship with her mother, and her self-doubts being a mother, who, like her father, needs huge amounts of time to write and reflect, too often to the detriment of her children. There is so much more to say about the complex emotional reflections of this brilliant author. I will content myself with a final comment about Miller’s unabashed love of men. Of course she is critical of the non-domesticity of many/most men, but her descriptions of her father and of the husbands in her novels leave no doubt that she admires so much about good men, good fathers.  Perhaps there is a book, The Good Father, in her future.

A Tribute to Novelist Sue Miller

Geraldine Brooks

I know next to nothing about horses and am, at best, a sloppy historian. Geraldine Brooks knows tons about horses and is a superb historian. Her 2022 book, Horse, fascinated me from the first page to the last. Her character Jess, in 2019, is an articulator, i.e. a combination artist and zoologist who puts together skeletons. She is hired by the Smithsonian Museum to dis-articulate and then re-articulate a famous horse skeleton. Dr. Catherine Morgan is a scientific researcher whom Jess has been assigned to assist. Says Catherine:One of my areas of interest is the effect of conformation on the locomotor biomechanics of the horse. Basically, I’m trying to determine what bone structure allows them to run fast while avoiding injury. To do that, I’m measuring and describing all the great racehorses whose skeletons are still available.Catherine stepped up to the exhibit label on the plinth and drew out her reading glasses. “Horse!” She read. “I can’t believe it. I don’t suppose you people have the Mona Lisa stashed somewhere, labeled Smiling Girl?”“Not just Horse,” she said. THE horse. What you have here is the greatest racing stallion in American turf history.Jess’ story is just one of the threads in this magnificent historical novel.  Warfield’s Jarret is a slave on the farm of a famous horse breeder, not given a last name, but identified by his owner’s name. Thomas Scott is a not well known artist who is commissioned to paint a portrait of Darley, a racehorse who has been given to Jarret’s father, Harry, who has bought his own freedom. The horse is given to him in lieu of a year’s wages, and yet it is against the law for a negro to own a racehorse, let alone to race him in stakes races. So, the horse must be officially registered in  Warfield’s name. It is Jarret who raises and trains the horse, and in a manner that differs in  important ways from tradition. Unlike today’s thoroughbreds who are raced as two year olds. Darley is not even ridden until he is much older. “When can we ride him? She asked.”“Long time yet, miss Clay. His bones got to grow. Best let that happen in its own good time. Harry, “didn’t hold with the newfangled idea of racing two-year-olds.”Instead the horses are not raced until they are four or older, and they are trained to run four mile heats, sometimes three such heats in a single day.Alongside the story of Darley the racehorse, there is in this carefully researched novel another more serious  strain regarding slavery and the perilous lives of slaves who can be bought and sold on the whim of the owner. Jarret’s father intends to buy his son out of slavery, but he has already depleted his funds in buying the freedom of his wife, and is counting on the purses from races to buy Jarret’s freedom.Jarret is close to horses from his infancy. “Look at him…He’s half colt himself.”The first bed he could remember was in a horse stall. He shared straw with the two geldings in the carriage house while his mother slept in the mansion, nursemaid to the mistress’s infant. Jarret hardly saw her. His first language had been the subtle gestures and sounds of horses. He’d been slow to master human speech, but he could interpret the horses: their moods, their alliances, their simple wants and many fears. He came to believe that horses lived with a world of fear, and when you grasped that, you had a clear idea of how to be with them.Much of this novel is about the mounting sense of rebellion among the slaves, wanting to run and to be free, but so aware of the consequences if caught. Theo, the Englishman horse painter is well aware of how negroes are depicted by artists, and is writing  a dissertation on the depictions of Africans in British art. He planned to write of Coon caricatures, Oriental fantasies, the decorative enslaved servant in ornate livery, proffering fruit or waving peacock-feathered fans for a White master. His thesis argued that these paintings were never meant to be viewed as portraits of individuals, merely status signifiers of the privilege, wealth, and power of the White sitters. The reality of quotidian Black life didn’t merit depiction…This is a superb novel on so many levels, and the journalist, historian Brooks juggles the various stories with the same craftsmanship that won her the Pulitzer prize for her earlier book March.

<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-PVcUrxgvdG6h5bMDMxHxUKtOxOvk7sRLOZmBPrq91iYFxQFQIzED4ktpAnIjrkoB4rZh26f_8ZPOOKtRLxH1O3QIL5VrcorXn0ymZpsZQQLbR2gGI3fkTwGe0fWHkAYoD6kUn7CG708iXgMJsZ2ZVKOa_LxY4gou2sjCGbSTkIObVy1P1g/s500/Horse%20by%20Geraldine%20Brooks.jpg" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a>I know next to nothing about horses and am, at best, a sloppy historian. Geraldine Brooks knows tons about horses and is a superb historian. Her 2022 book, Horse, fascinated me from the first page to the last. Her character Jess, in 2019, is an articulator, i.e. a combination artist and zoologist who puts together skeletons. She is hired by the Smithsonian Museum to dis-articulate and then re-articulate a famous horse skeleton. Dr. Catherine Morgan is a scientific researcher whom Jess has been assigned to assist. Says Catherine:<blockquote>One of my areas of interest is the effect of conformation on the locomotor biomechanics of the horse. Basically, I’m trying to determine what bone structure allows them to run fast while avoiding injury. To do that, I’m measuring and describing all the great racehorses whose skeletons are still available.Catherine stepped up to the exhibit label on the plinth and drew out her reading glasses. “Horse!” She read. “I can’t believe it. I don’t suppose you people have the Mona Lisa stashed somewhere, labeled Smiling Girl?”“Not just Horse,” she said. THE horse. What you have here is the greatest racing stallion in American turf history.</blockquote>Jess’ story is just one of the threads in this magnificent historical novel.  Warfield’s Jarret is a slave on the farm of a famous horse breeder, not given a last name, but identified by his owner’s name. Thomas Scott is a not well known artist who is commissioned to paint a portrait of Darley, a racehorse who has been given to Jarret’s father, Harry, who has bought his own freedom. The horse is given to him in lieu of a year’s wages, and yet it is against the law for a negro to own a racehorse, let alone to race him in stakes races. So, the horse must be officially registered in  Warfield’s name. It is Jarret who raises and trains the horse, and in a manner that differs in  important ways from tradition. Unlike today’s thoroughbreds who are raced as two year olds. Darley is not even ridden until he is much older. <blockquote>“When can we ride him? She asked.”“Long time yet, miss Clay. His bones got to grow. Best let that happen in its own good time. Harry, “didn’t hold with the newfangled idea of racing two-year-olds.”</blockquote>Instead the horses are not raced until they are four or older, and they are trained to run four mile heats, sometimes three such heats in a single day.Alongside the story of Darley the racehorse, there is in this carefully researched novel another more serious  strain regarding slavery and the perilous lives of slaves who can be bought and sold on the whim of the owner. Jarret’s father intends to buy his son out of slavery, but he has already depleted his funds in buying the freedom of his wife, and is counting on the purses from races to buy Jarret’s freedom.Jarret is close to horses from his infancy. “Look at him…He’s half colt himself.”<blockquote>The first bed he could remember was in a horse stall. He shared straw with the two geldings in the carriage house while his mother slept in the mansion, nursemaid to the mistress’s infant. Jarret hardly saw her. His first language had been the subtle gestures and sounds of horses. He’d been slow to master human speech, but he could interpret the horses: their moods, their alliances, their simple wants and many fears. He came to believe that horses lived with a world of fear, and when you grasped that, you had a clear idea of how to be with them.</blockquote>Much of this novel is about the mounting sense of rebellion among the slaves, wanting to run and to be free, but so aware of the consequences if caught. Theo, the Englishman horse painter is well aware of how negroes are depicted by artists, and is writing  a dissertation on the depictions of Africans in British art. <blockquote>He planned to write of Coon caricatures, Oriental fantasies, the decorative enslaved servant in ornate livery, proffering fruit or waving peacock-feathered fans for a White master. His thesis argued that these paintings were never meant to be viewed as portraits of individuals, merely status signifiers of the privilege, wealth, and power of the White sitters. The reality of quotidian Black life didn’t merit depiction…</blockquote>This is a superb novel on so many levels, and the journalist, historian Brooks juggles the various stories with the same craftsmanship that won her the Pulitzer prize for her earlier book March.

Horse by Geraldine Brooks

He’s been much more careful in his marriage to Annie. More careful and more faithful.    Yet not entirely faithful.    Which is partly what’s making him remember the end with Frieda. Because he’s done it again.Sue Miller has done it again: written an astounding novel about family life and all of its complexities. In her newest novel, Monogamy, published in 2020, Miller undertakes to describe in meticulous detail the marriage of Graham and Annie. I will not be spoiling the novel for you readers by telling you that the anatomy of this marriage is described after Graham dies in his sleep of a heart attack. Viewed as an ideal couple by those who know them, Miller shows us the underside of the marriage as Annie begins to deal with her grief.Both Annie and Graham have been married before. During the 70s Graham and Frieda had decided to experiment with an open marriage.An open marriage. They’d agreed on it at first. It had been that era—the world was shifting and changing rapidly around them, and Graham had stepped into this altered universe eagerly, along with what seemed like half of Cambridge, compelled by all the things it seemed to promise—among them a different meaning for marriage, for sex.The problems was that Graham had been happy in this new world, and Frieda hadn’t. She tired, she dutifully had a few lovers in the first year or so. But then she got pregnant with Lucas and realized that she’d really never wanted any of it.As was so often the case, men jumped at this new freedom while so many women simply went along with it, or pretended to, in order to preserve their marriages. It is Frieda who steps away from the marriage, taking Lucas with her. Eventually, Graham and Frieda become friends and share custody of their young son. Frieda also, though not by choice, assumes the role of confessor for Graham, and he confesses to her his infidelity with a recently divorced woman in their circle of friends, Her name is Rosemary, and he also tells his oldest male friend about his new ‘slip’. The problem is that Rosemary—Rosemary Gregory, the woman he’s slept with maybe four maybe five times—has started to behave as if there’s some kind of commitment between them, as though she has a claim on him...He needs to end it, but that’s something he’s never been good at—disappointing people. At being, as he sees it,  unkind.After his death, Annie discovers that both his best friend and Frieda knew of the infidelity, and it seems as if perhaps everyone knows but Annie.  What is most amazing about Miller’s writing is how completely she develops her characters and how thoroughly she describes their lives. Although describing only an incident here and there, a memory of the past, an anticipation of the future, it feels to the reader that they are being told everything in detail.  Philosophers who called themselves phenomenologists argued that philosophy should be a description of lived life, and as Iris Murdoch has pointed out, if this is, indeed, the task of the philosopher, then novelists are the very best at doing this. And Sue Miller is of the first rank in this description of the lived inner lives of her characters. In the past couple of months I have read four of Miller’s novels, all close descriptions of marriages and family life. The Senator’s Wife equals the exquisitely detailed description of the slow dissolution of a marriage. While I Was Gone also displays the immense emotional intelligence of Sue Miller.  It is hard to do justice to her novels by reviewing them, since their greatness is in the magnificent description of the relationships. She does not preach, and tells us that she has no great insights about monogamy or marriage. But I think you will disagree with the author’ own assessment of her work if you swim into her wonderfully articulated stories.

<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9g15j9cSAn9yKeNBctvAw3pWsjG7yXgXncOl7jsrGXC3Jw70nTUl5LdMqUCsCVGrrPqM0KbaEEj6uDypxxX-hB3l6SSv1BoI1n4q-2bXa4is2xKjxADiiCLxpOIc6lrg8iEmoXJ-vMhnmYYrSps5wUcxkHLVSTZurrccyj72RNcZDa6b8xw/s500/Monogamy%20by%20Sue%20Miller.jpg" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a>He’s been much more careful in his marriage to Annie. More careful and more faithful.     Yet not entirely faithful.     Which is partly what’s making him remember the end with Frieda.  Because he’s done it again.Sue Miller has done it again: written an astounding novel about family life and all of its complexities. In her newest novel, Monogamy, published in 2020, Miller undertakes to describe in meticulous detail the marriage of Graham and Annie. I will not be spoiling the novel for you readers by telling you that the anatomy of this marriage is described after Graham dies in his sleep of a heart attack. Viewed as an ideal couple by those who know them, Miller shows us the underside of the marriage as Annie begins to deal with her grief.Both Annie and Graham have been married before. During the 70s Graham and Frieda had decided to experiment with an open marriage.<blockquote>An open marriage. They’d agreed on it at first. It had been that era—the world was shifting and changing rapidly around them, and Graham had stepped into this altered universe eagerly, along with what seemed like half of Cambridge, compelled by all the things it seemed to promise—among them a different meaning for marriage, for sex.The problems was that Graham had been happy in this new world, and Frieda hadn’t. She tired, she dutifully had a few lovers in the first year or so. But then she got pregnant with Lucas and realized that she’d really never wanted any of it.</blockquote>As was so often the case, men jumped at this new freedom while so many women simply went along with it, or pretended to, in order to preserve their marriages. It is Frieda who steps away from the marriage, taking Lucas with her. Eventually, Graham and Frieda become friends and share custody of their young son. Frieda also, though not by choice, assumes the role of confessor for Graham, and he confesses to her his infidelity with a recently divorced woman in their circle of friends, Her name is Rosemary, and he also tells his oldest male friend about his new ‘slip’. <blockquote>The problem is that Rosemary—Rosemary Gregory, the woman he’s slept with maybe four maybe five times—has started to behave as if there’s some kind of commitment between them, as though she has a claim on him...He needs to end it, but that’s something he’s never been good at—disappointing people. At being, as he sees it,  unkind.</blockquote>After his death, Annie discovers that both his best friend and Frieda knew of the infidelity, and it seems as if perhaps everyone knows but Annie.  What is most amazing about Miller’s writing is how completely she develops her characters and how thoroughly she describes their lives. Although describing only an incident here and there, a memory of the past, an anticipation of the future, it feels to the reader that they are being told everything in detail.  Philosophers who called themselves phenomenologists argued that philosophy should be a description of lived life, and as Iris Murdoch has pointed out, if this is, indeed, the task of the philosopher, then novelists are the very best at doing this. And Sue Miller is of the first rank in this description of the lived inner lives of her characters. In the past couple of months I have read four of Miller’s novels, all close descriptions of marriages and family life. The Senator’s Wife equals the exquisitely detailed description of the slow dissolution of a marriage. While I Was Gone also displays the immense emotional intelligence of Sue Miller.  It is hard to do justice to her novels by reviewing them, since their greatness is in the magnificent description of the relationships. She does not preach, and tells us that she has no great insights about monogamy or marriage. But I think you will disagree with the author’ own assessment of her work if you swim into her wonderfully articulated stories.

Monogamy by Sue Miller

Preeti Desai is a successful corporate lawyer who has, in her estimation, finally achieved the assimilation into American culture that she had striven all of her life to achieve. But then a horrible accident involving her brother and sister-in-law, call her back to India, and she realizes how much she still walks like and elephant. Her mother has told her this so often. “I was around nine years old when I realized she wasn’t calling me fat. She meant that I wasn’t demure and obedient—qualities ever good Indian daughter  should have.”And so begins this fascinating, sometimes heartbreaking story of an Indian family that has immigrated to the U.S. and parents who desperately want their two children to assimilate and succeed as Americans, but also want them to retain Indian values and culture. Mansi Shah, with her incisive and lovely prose lays out this story in her 2022 novel, A Taste of Ginger.Preeti has not talked to her mother for months:Not since she found out that my boyfriend—now ex-boyfriend—and I had been living together in Los Angelas. Cohabitating with a dhoriya was, in her opinion, the most shameful thing her daughter could have done. Living with a white boy was right up there with marrying someone from a lower caste or talking back to your elders.Preeti and her brother, Neel, have been striving since childhood to sluff off Indian clothes and habits in order to succeed in this new home in Chicago.Despite living in America for over twenty years, my parents didn’t have any friends who weren’t Gujarati. Much to my chagrin as a teenager trying to fit into this new country. Devon Avenue gave my parents the option of living in the West without giving up the East, and expecting their children to do the same.When her brother and pregnant sister-in-law are seriously injured in a rickshaw truck accident in India, Preeti must fly ‘home’ although she risks losing her job at the law firm where she works 60+ hour a week. And there she finds as an NRI (non-resident Indian) that she is as singled out and foreign as she has been in the states. Unlike in Los Angela, in India she looks the same as those around her, but is immediately set apart.Having been born in a higher caste, her family had lived a relatively wealthy life in India with servants to care for their daily needs; in America her engineer father is not recognized for the educated man he is and must take on what for him is menial labor. It is not until she returns to India that she really realizes how much her parents had given up to come to America. Neither had she really understood the Indian caste system, which she is forced to recognize when she has the audacity to associate with an Indian photographer who is of a lower caste. And finally, she did not realize that her mother had been unhappy in this country, yearning for her old life in India, but unwilling to go back.As an immigrant child of immigrant parents, I grew up knowing my future had to be their future. That meant getting the best grades , going to the best college, and getting the best job to ensure the sacrifices they had made for us were validated.While her brother Neel has also had to work hard to assimilate, he has been able to retain some core Indian values. He marries a very traditional Indian girl who seems to easily balance the two cultures. Preeti admires but also resents her apparent ease as she reverts to Indian values.  “You guys are among the lucky few that have a love marriage that fell within the biodata matches of the arranged system, and you have to protect it...You have to give me hope that someday, somewhere, i will be able to find that kind of happiness too.”Although her sister-in-law survives the accident, the baby does not, and it turns out that Preeti must stay in India much longer than intended to help her loved brother re-unite with his grief-stricken wife.Shah develops her story and her charters slowly with a keen eye and forgiving heart. Over the  time there, she finally manages to reconnect with her mother, and to realize how she has struggled in her American life. She also comes to understand how limited her knowledge of the caste system is.During my Indian childhood and infrequent trips back, I had never had occasion to be around anyone from another caste outside of servants and vendors, and I wasn’t familiar with the differences in lifestyle between them. It hadn’t occurred to me that there were public schools here because I’d only known people who went to private ones. What I knew of India applied only to the upper caste, and I realized I knew nothing of how most of the country lived.

<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJ7G29DO4zd_UCeF9hTEi9861eqryK2dgKokYx9wn29MMgOhTdApgQeQZdcrQb4Q_--BxI7nb0wG3dVE9LXsXM-QPkLKR6SL-3Yq0dru12xcnSgF_TcdmwXGVljlpQXkFRDK353pZDEsQknNNifFkB4yAaKmxvgMg9OepbUfYvSxpbc3HHdw/s500/The%20Taste%20of%20Ginger,%20by%20Mansi%20Shah.jpg" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a>Preeti Desai is a successful corporate lawyer who has, in her estimation, finally achieved the assimilation into American culture that she had striven all of her life to achieve. But then a horrible accident involving her brother and sister-in-law, call her back to India, and she realizes how much she still walks like and elephant. Her mother has told her this so often. “I was around nine years old when I realized she wasn’t calling me fat. She meant that I wasn’t demure and obedient—qualities ever good Indian daughter  should have.”And so begins this fascinating, sometimes heartbreaking story of an Indian family that has immigrated to the U.S. and parents who desperately want their two children to assimilate and succeed as Americans, but also want them to retain Indian values and culture. Mansi Shah, with her incisive and lovely prose lays out this story in her 2022 novel, A Taste of Ginger.Preeti has not talked to her mother for months:<blockquote>Not since she found out that my boyfriend—now ex-boyfriend—and I had been living together in Los Angelas. Cohabitating with a dhoriya was, in her opinion, the most shameful thing her daughter could have done. Living with a white boy was right up there with marrying someone from a lower caste or talking back to your elders.</blockquote>Preeti and her brother, Neel, have been striving since childhood to sluff off Indian clothes and habits in order to succeed in this new home in Chicago.<blockquote>Despite living in America for over twenty years, my parents didn’t have any friends who weren’t Gujarati. Much to my chagrin as a teenager trying to fit into this new country. Devon Avenue gave my parents the option of living in the West without giving up the East, and expecting their children to do the same.</blockquote>When her brother and pregnant sister-in-law are seriously injured in a rickshaw truck accident in India, Preeti must fly ‘home’ although she risks losing her job at the law firm where she works 60+ hour a week. And there she finds as an NRI (non-resident Indian) that she is as singled out and foreign as she has been in the states. Unlike in Los Angela, in India she looks the same as those around her, but is immediately set apart.Having been born in a higher caste, her family had lived a relatively wealthy life in India with servants to care for their daily needs; in America her engineer father is not recognized for the educated man he is and must take on what for him is menial labor. It is not until she returns to India that she really realizes how much her parents had given up to come to America. Neither had she really understood the Indian caste system, which she is forced to recognize when she has the audacity to associate with an Indian photographer who is of a lower caste. And finally, she did not realize that her mother had been unhappy in this country, yearning for her old life in India, but unwilling to go back.<blockquote>As an immigrant child of immigrant parents, I grew up knowing my future had to be their future. That meant getting the best grades , going to the best college, and getting the best job to ensure the sacrifices they had made for us were validated.</blockquote>While her brother Neel has also had to work hard to assimilate, he has been able to retain some core Indian values. He marries a very traditional Indian girl who seems to easily balance the two cultures. Preeti admires but also resents her apparent ease as she reverts to Indian values.  “You guys are among the lucky few that have a love marriage that fell within the biodata matches of the arranged system, and you have to protect it...You have to give me hope that someday, somewhere, i will be able to find that kind of happiness too.”Although her sister-in-law survives the accident, the baby does not, and it turns out that Preeti must stay in India much longer than intended to help her loved brother re-unite with his grief-stricken wife.Shah develops her story and her charters slowly with a keen eye and forgiving heart. Over the  time there, she finally manages to reconnect with her mother, and to realize how she has struggled in her American life. She also comes to understand how limited her knowledge of the caste system is.<blockquote>During my Indian childhood and infrequent trips back, I had never had occasion to be around anyone from another caste outside of servants and vendors, and I wasn’t familiar with the differences in lifestyle between them. It hadn’t occurred to me that there were public schools here because I’d only known people who went to private ones. What I knew of India applied only to the upper caste, and I realized I knew nothing of how most of the country lived.</blockquote>

The Taste of Ginger by Mansi Shah

Judy Blunt

Judy Blunt wrote these lovely snapshots of thirty years of life on wheat and cattle ranches in northeastern Montana as memoir. It stuns me that I had not run across this book before, finally gathered together as a book in 2002. Many, even most, of my reader friends had read this long ago. I’m happy I discovered the volume on a friend’s bookshelf during a recent train trip to Salt lake City.In August of 1986, I left Phillips County with a new divorce and an old car, with three scared kids and some clothes piled in back.  We followed the sun west for hours, climbing mountain passes, crossing river after river, until we spanned the final bridge into Missoula. The kids started school the next morning, and within days I started my freshman year at the University of Montana, the four of us holding hands and stepping together into a world of mountains and shopping malls.I have to suppose the title is ironic, since the break was anything but clean. First, at thirteen, she fought against turning into a woman, then married a man twice her age whom she started dating at fifteen and married at eighteen. A marriage more of inevitability than choice. I was eighteen when I walked down the aisle on my father’s arm. The groom was almost thirty, a man of simple tastes and few passions, staunch honor and little experience. I joined  him at the alter, bristling with independence yet eager to please, desperate for attention yet filled with fierce energy born of old anger—a riddle behind my homemade veil.  From my parents to the unwitting hands of my husband I passed the terrible power of judgment and reward, the absolute authority I connected with love.Blunt understand how two edged the praise was for tough ranch women. ‘allowed’ to do men’s work, but never to own land or livestock. In my real-life, out-west community, the depressing sequel was being written as i watched, and the work parts were harder to skip. I knew women savvy to the working of cattle and horses, women who rode the hay rake in June and took to the fields at harvest. But without exception, they picked up a thank-you and walked back to tackle the work that was theirs alone. Women’s work. If I learned nothing else in my early years, I learned the scorn that twisted those words into insults.The prose in this book is simple but so beautiful. Hard to believe she did not really start writing until she was in her thirties. I could easily make this review simply a string of quote from the book.Womanly arts be damned. I wanted the ease, the power, of my mother, horseback. I wanted the real myth, and I set out to get it. That fall, as I turned twelve, the sole member of my peer group defected. My cousin Lois turned thirteen and despite our blood-sister oath forbidding such things, she put on a bra, ratted her hair into haystacks and kissed the hired man. I worked on my own appearance with grim determination. I spit and crossed my legs like  field hand. , I peeled my nails off with my teeth, and kept my hair bobbed away from my face. I preferred stacking bales and working cattle, and ducked house chores when I could. I climbed trees, rode the milk pen steers to a standstill and strung frogs ten-deep on a willow spear. I read myself into the strongest characters  of  half the Malta library. I made it last a year. And when, in the inexorable process of time, as my body betrayed me, my rage was terrible....Dark brown hair, sun-faded to the color of  hay, ear length and shaggy, needing a wash. A big, raw-boned girl my mother said. Tall for twelve. A square, horsy face, I thought, yet hidden by owlish glasses, chin jutting like a shoehorn, my father’s chin and his wolfish teeth wrangling for space behind my tight lips...That night I tiptoed to the bathroom, selected a clean sock from the laundry basket and gripped it in my teeth, just in case. After dabbing my bare chest with alcohol, I attempted to lance my breast buds with a darning needle.Unable to prevent either her periods or her budding breasts, she finally succumbs to adulthood. While many of these little vignettes are sad or frightening, they are not without humor and and told as only a born storyteller can tell them. I loved this book. It returned me to the simple joy of reading. Judy Blunt is a tough and brilliant woman who finally broke clean in her thirties and pursued the education she had always dreamed of. She had to defy her husband and her community to do it. She shows us a tough ranch-women’s brand of feminism built in the crucible of hard work and  bearing children.

<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkGOUzK2VUmGT8Z20hSc0PrH9Apv6313WgoP4NYhauVzSbGai3qjjEL2A3-L5BbXdEkh47zSyWmKWBmZ8imdmLaWFjzxUpilhggDqbc3BJ6nl7f5dSDICjDmur7JddNlRH1yk5T6yTdOVOdjDcIVcjRsbuDr764xGsBF_AEK7zrXNq96hPBA/s500/Breaking%20Clean%20by%20Judy%20Blunt.jpg" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a>Judy Blunt wrote these lovely snapshots of thirty years of life on wheat and cattle ranches in northeastern Montana as memoir. It stuns me that I had not run across this book before, finally gathered together as a book in 2002. Many, even most, of my reader friends had read this long ago. I’m happy I discovered the volume on a friend’s bookshelf during a recent train trip to Salt lake City.<blockquote>In August of 1986, I left Phillips County with a new divorce and an old car, with three scared kids and some clothes piled in back.  We followed the sun west for hours, climbing mountain passes, crossing river after river, until we spanned the final bridge into Missoula. The kids started school the next morning, and within days I started my freshman year at the University of Montana, the four of us holding hands and stepping together into a world of mountains and shopping malls.</blockquote>I have to suppose the title is ironic, since the break was anything but clean. First, at thirteen, she fought against turning into a woman, then married a man twice her age whom she started dating at fifteen and married at eighteen. A marriage more of inevitability than choice. <blockquote>I was eighteen when I walked down the aisle on my father’s arm. The groom was almost thirty, a man of simple tastes and few passions, staunch honor and little experience. I joined  him at the alter, bristling with independence yet eager to please, desperate for attention yet filled with fierce energy born of old anger—a riddle behind my homemade veil.  From my parents to the unwitting hands of my husband I passed the terrible power of judgment and reward, the absolute authority I connected with love.</blockquote>Blunt understand how two edged the praise was for tough ranch women. ‘allowed’ to do men’s work, but never to own land or livestock. <blockquote>In my real-life, out-west community, the depressing sequel was being written as i watched, and the work parts were harder to skip. I knew women savvy to the working of cattle and horses, women who rode the hay rake in June and took to the fields at harvest. But without exception, they picked up a thank-you and walked back to tackle the work that was theirs alone. Women’s work. If I learned nothing else in my early years, I learned the scorn that twisted those words into insults.</blockquote>The prose in this book is simple but so beautiful. Hard to believe she did not really start writing until she was in her thirties. I could easily make this review simply a string of quote from the book.<blockquote>Womanly arts be damned. I wanted the ease, the power, of my mother, horseback. I wanted the real myth, and I set out to get it. That fall, as I turned twelve, the sole member of my peer group defected. My cousin Lois turned thirteen and despite our blood-sister oath forbidding such things, she put on a bra, ratted her hair into haystacks and kissed the hired man. I worked on my own appearance with grim determination. I spit and crossed my legs like  field hand. , I peeled my nails off with my teeth, and kept my hair bobbed away from my face. I preferred stacking bales and working cattle, and ducked house chores when I could. I climbed trees, rode the milk pen steers to a standstill and strung frogs ten-deep on a willow spear. I read myself into the strongest characters  of  half the Malta library. I made it last a year. And when, in the inexorable process of time, as my body betrayed me, my rage was terrible....Dark brown hair, sun-faded to the color of  hay, ear length and shaggy, needing a wash. A big, raw-boned girl my mother said. Tall for twelve. A square, horsy face, I thought, yet hidden by owlish glasses, chin jutting like a shoehorn, my father’s chin and his wolfish teeth wrangling for space behind my tight lips...That night I tiptoed to the bathroom, selected a clean sock from the laundry basket and gripped it in my teeth, just in case. After dabbing my bare chest with alcohol, I attempted to lance my breast buds with a darning needle.</blockquote>Unable to prevent either her periods or her budding breasts, she finally succumbs to adulthood. While many of these little vignettes are sad or frightening, they are not without humor and and told as only a born storyteller can tell them. I loved this book. It returned me to the simple joy of reading. Judy Blunt is a tough and brilliant woman who finally broke clean in her thirties and pursued the education she had always dreamed of. She had to defy her husband and her community to do it. She shows us a tough ranch-women’s brand of feminism built in the crucible of hard work and  bearing children.

Breaking Clean by Judy Blunt

Elizabeth Zott is a brilliant chemist who, perhaps unfortunately, is also beautiful.Once a research chemist, Elizabeth Zott was a woman with flawless skin and an unmistakable demeanor of someone who was not average and never would be.The main character in Bonnie Garmus’ delightful 2022 novel, Lessons in Chemistry is as stubborn as she is brilliant. She refuses to be seen as simply an extension of her Nobel Prize nominated boyfriend whom she lives with but refuses to marry. Her hiring by a scientific think-tank is already viewed by the male workforce as due to the influence of her famous boyfriend. And she realizes that no matter how brilliant her work is, she will be seen as riding the coat-tails of Calvin Evans.Elizabeth meets Calvin when he discovers her stealing beakers from his lab, which she explains is due to a lack of funding for her research. “The problem, Calvin,” she asserted, “is that half the population is being wasted. It’s not just that i can’t get the supplies I need to complete my work, it’s that women can’t get the education they need to do what they’re meant to do. And even if they do attend college, it will never be in a place like Cambridge. Which means they won’t be offered the same opportunities nor afforded the same respect. They’ll start at the bottom and stay there. Don’t even get me started on pay. And all because they didn’t attend a school that wouldn’t admit them in the first place.”The action in this novel takes place in the 60s, but Garmus thinks not much has changed since then.Garmus creates some really funny and delightful characters including a dog who understands a very large number of words and a precocious daughter “who could hum a Bach concerto but couldn’t tie her own shoes; who could explain the earth’s rotation but stumbled at tac-tac-toe.”The plot of the novel is less important than the commentary on science and society that Garmus provides. Briefly put, Calvin dies, and Elizabeth is fired from the research institute soon after his death. Out of a job and nearly broke, she has little to do but work on her already very accomplished cooking skills. Cooking she insists is like chemistry, in fact it is chemistry at the practical level. Eventually in this whacky story, Elizabeth becomes the reluctant star of a cooking show, Supper at Six. Unexpectedly, the show is a huge hit, and she soon has a devoted following. Between recipes, Elizabeth provides running commentary on the absurd exclusion of women from science, making them stay at home and make babies in a form of legalized slavery.The all-male workforce at the institute sees Elizabeth’s research project as unimportant and bound to go nowhere, and after she is fired, her work is simply stolen by one of her male colleagues. Only Calvin recognizes her brilliance, and he is no longer there to defend her. Darwin had long ago proposed that life sprang from a single-celled bacterium, which then went on to diversify into a complex planet of people, plants, and animals. Zott? She was like a bloodhound on the trail of where that first cell had come from. In other words , she was out to solve one of the greatest chemical mysteries of all time, and if her findings continued apace, there was no question she would do just that.As her fame blossoms as cooking-show host, Elizabeth has only one real friend, Harriet, whom Elizabeth has hired as her assistant. They agree on most things, but not on one essential point. According to Harriet, men were a world apart from women. They required coddling, they had fragile egos, they couldn’t allow a woman intelligence or skill if it exceeded their own. “Harriet that’s ridiculous,” Elizabeth had argued. “Men and women are both human beings. And as humans, we’re by-products of our upbringings, victims of our lackluster educational system, and choosers of our behaviors.  In short, the reduction of women to something LESS than men, and the elevation of men to something MORE than women, is not biological: it’s cultural.I did not choose this book for its political significance, but simply because it sounded delightful and it is. Bonnie Garmus has worked widely in the fields of technology, medicine and education, and she shows off her considerable talents in this wonderful comedic novel. Like her zany character Elizabeth, Bonnie decides, “Don’t work the system. Outsmart it.”If you as a reader sometimes read a book just for the delight of reading it, this is a book for you, easily the funniest and most clever book I have read this year.

<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_k0TPBjx5IZb-t9lDCFtNJGTvcc6Y5nDXljKkkC3QPz00aQBALq217Dfc3ogTH7sNn7q4nSa9PD1n9tFOprA-H_dd9iYwivfQynz0y7oQE5EtrMaRXYqg0R4-ci5bJCRjTl7-elTrLkiZ0l9Ox0wWLmL-a_m70l4OGTWkw4t03kJs1Hl94g/s500/Lessons%20in%20Chemistry%20by%20Bonnie%20Garmus.jpg" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a>Elizabeth Zott is a brilliant chemist who, perhaps unfortunately, is also beautiful.Once a research chemist, Elizabeth Zott was a woman with flawless skin and an unmistakable demeanor of someone who was not average and never would be.The main character in Bonnie Garmus’ delightful 2022 novel, Lessons in Chemistry is as stubborn as she is brilliant. She refuses to be seen as simply an extension of her Nobel Prize nominated boyfriend whom she lives with but refuses to marry. Her hiring by a scientific think-tank is already viewed by the male workforce as due to the influence of her famous boyfriend. And she realizes that no matter how brilliant her work is, she will be seen as riding the coat-tails of Calvin Evans.Elizabeth meets Calvin when he discovers her stealing beakers from his lab, which she explains is due to a lack of funding for her research. <blockquote>“The problem, Calvin,” she asserted, “is that half the population is being wasted. It’s not just that i can’t get the supplies I need to complete my work, it’s that women can’t get the education they need to do what they’re meant to do. And even if they do attend college, it will never be in a place like Cambridge. Which means they won’t be offered the same opportunities nor afforded the same respect. They’ll start at the bottom and stay there. Don’t even get me started on pay. And all because they didn’t attend a school that wouldn’t admit them in the first place.”</blockquote>The action in this novel takes place in the 60s, but Garmus thinks not much has changed since then.Garmus creates some really funny and delightful characters including a dog who understands a very large number of words and a precocious daughter “who could hum a Bach concerto but couldn’t tie her own shoes; who could explain the earth’s rotation but stumbled at tac-tac-toe.”The plot of the novel is less important than the commentary on science and society that Garmus provides. Briefly put, Calvin dies, and Elizabeth is fired from the research institute soon after his death. Out of a job and nearly broke, she has little to do but work on her already very accomplished cooking skills. Cooking she insists is like chemistry, in fact it is chemistry at the practical level. Eventually in this whacky story, Elizabeth becomes the reluctant star of a cooking show, Supper at Six. Unexpectedly, the show is a huge hit, and she soon has a devoted following. Between recipes, Elizabeth provides running commentary on the absurd exclusion of women from science, making them stay at home and make babies in a form of legalized slavery.The all-male workforce at the institute sees Elizabeth’s research project as unimportant and bound to go nowhere, and after she is fired, her work is simply stolen by one of her male colleagues. Only Calvin recognizes her brilliance, and he is no longer there to defend her. <blockquote>Darwin had long ago proposed that life sprang from a single-celled bacterium, which then went on to diversify into a complex planet of people, plants, and animals. Zott? She was like a bloodhound on the trail of where that first cell had come from. In other words , she was out to solve one of the greatest chemical mysteries of all time, and if her findings continued apace, there was no question she would do just that.</blockquote>As her fame blossoms as cooking-show host, Elizabeth has only one real friend, Harriet, whom Elizabeth has hired as her assistant. They agree on most things, but not on one essential point. <blockquote>According to Harriet, men were a world apart from women. They required coddling, they had fragile egos, they couldn’t allow a woman intelligence or skill if it exceeded their own. “Harriet that’s ridiculous,” Elizabeth had argued. “Men and women are both human beings. And as humans, we’re by-products of our upbringings, victims of our lackluster educational system, and choosers of our behaviors.  In short, the reduction of women to something LESS than men, and the elevation of men to something MORE than women, is not biological: it’s cultural.</blockquote>I did not choose this book for its political significance, but simply because it sounded delightful and it is. Bonnie Garmus has worked widely in the fields of technology, medicine and education, and she shows off her considerable talents in this wonderful comedic novel. Like her zany character Elizabeth, Bonnie decides, “Don’t work the system. Outsmart it.”If you as a reader sometimes read a book just for the delight of reading it, this is a book for you, easily the funniest and most clever book I have read this year.

Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus

Daniel Quinn

Teacher seeks pupil. Must hast have an earnest desire to save the worldApply in personThis ad enrages the narrator of the book, Ishmael. Although he has in the past sought a teacher, he is now disillusioned, and angry at the naive audacity of the ad. He answers the ad simply to expose the person who wrote it as a fake. Imagine his response when he discovers just who that is.Because it was backed by darkness, the glass in this window was black—opaque, reflective. I made no attempt to see beyond as I approached. I was the spectacle under observation. On arrival, I continued to gaze into my own eyes for a moment, then rolled the focus forward beyond the glass—and found myself looking into another pair of eyes.I fell back, startled. Then recognizing what I’d seen. I fell back again, now a little frightened.The creature on the other side of the glass was a full-grown gorilla.And so begins one of the most captivating and insightful books I have read in years. Actually the book had gone through several iterations until Quinn published the current version in 1992.I’m surprised it took me so long to discover this brilliant treatise on human’s destruction of the earth, quite a fitting topic for our earth-day show.Yes, he is being interviewed by a gorilla and a very clever one at that. A poster on the wall readsWITH MAN GONEWILL THERE BE HOPEFOR GORILLA? This koan recurs many times in the book. The gorilla announces, “I am the teacher,’ and so begins an incredibly complex discussion of how we got to where we are, and how we might save ourselves and the rest of sentient life forms on earth.Once you learn to discern the voice of Mother Culture humming in the background, telling her story over and over again to the people of your culture, you’ll never stop being conscious of it. Wherever you go for the rest of your life, you’ll be tempted to say to the people around you ‘How can you listen to this stuff and not recognize it for what it is?’ and if you do this, people will look at you oddly and wonder what the devil you’re talking about. In other words, if you take this educational journey with me, you’re going to find yourself alienated from the people around you—friends, family, past associates, and so on. There is a whole philosophy of history spun out in the gorilla’s lessons, from creation myths to a tracing of the history of agriculture. The story of The Leavers and The Takers. The story is too complex to simply overview, nor am i anything like as clever as Quinn and the gorilla. “And so your account of creation ends, ’And finally man appeared.’“Yes.”“Meaning what?”“Meaning that there was no more to come. Meaning that creation had come to an end.”“This is what it was all leading up to”“Yes.’“Of course. Everyone in your culture knows this. The pinnacle was reached in man. Man is the climax of the whole cosmic drama of creation.”“Yes.”“When man finally appeared, creation came to an end, because its objective had been reached. There was nothing left to create.”“That seems to be the unspoken assumption.”Ishmael is a wise if impatient teacher and he does not simply lay out his theory of how we came to this precipice we are on, he proceeds in Socratic fashion, urging the narrator to dig out the story, and play his part in discovery, to bring out of concealment the story of our own destruction.At first I thought that the author must have read The Sixth Extinction, and was playing off of it, but if anything, it is the other way around since this novel predates the publication of The Sixth Extinction and centers more on economic history than on scientific data.In essence, the world was made for man, and man was made to rule it. But since the world would not meekly submit, man had to conquer it.“I’m saying that the price you’ve paid is not the price of becoming human. It’s not even the price of having the things you just mentioned. It’s the price of enacting a story that casts mankind as the enemy of the world.“Martin Heidegger tells a similar story in his essay, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in which he claims that the present worlding, the world we are bringing  into existence, treats nature as standing reserve, that which stands in reserve for us to use and use up. Quinn’s version of the story sis far less pompous than Heidegger’s and far more entertaining.

Teacher seeks pupil. Must hast have an earnest desire to save the world Apply in person This ad enrages the narrator of the book, Ishmael. Although he has in the past sought a teacher, he is now disillusioned, and angry at the naive audacity of the ad. He answers the ad simply to expose the person who wrote it as a fake. Imagine his response when he discovers just who that is.<blockquote>Because it was backed by darkness, the glass in this window was black—opaque, reflective. I made no attempt to see beyond as I approached. I was the spectacle under observation. On arrival, I continued to gaze into my own eyes for a moment, then rolled the focus forward beyond the glass—and found myself looking into another pair of eyes.I fell back, startled. Then recognizing what I’d seen. I fell back again, now a little frightened.The creature on the other side of the glass was a full-grown gorilla.</blockquote>And so begins one of the most captivating and insightful books I have read in years. Actually the book had gone through several iterations until Quinn published the current version in 1992.I’m surprised it took me so long to discover this brilliant treatise on human’s destruction of the earth, quite a fitting topic for our earth-day show.Yes, he is being interviewed by a gorilla and a very clever one at that. A poster on the wall readsWITH MAN GONEWILL THERE BE HOPEFOR GORILLA? This koan recurs many times in the book. The gorilla announces, “I am the teacher,’ and so begins an incredibly complex discussion of how we got to where we are, and how we might save ourselves and the rest of sentient life forms on earth.<blockquote>Once you learn to discern the voice of Mother Culture humming in the background, telling her story over and over again to the people of your culture, you’ll never stop being conscious of it. Wherever you go for the rest of your life, you’ll be tempted to say to the people around you ‘How can you listen to this stuff and not recognize it for what it is?’ and if you do this, people will look at you oddly and wonder what the devil you’re talking about. In other words, if you take this educational journey with me, you’re going to find yourself alienated from the people around you—friends, family, past associates, and so on. </blockquote>There is a whole philosophy of history spun out in the gorilla’s lessons, from creation myths to a tracing of the history of agriculture. The story of The Leavers and The Takers. The story is too complex to simply overview, nor am i anything like as clever as Quinn and the gorilla. <blockquote>“And so your account of creation ends, ’And finally man appeared.’“Yes.”“Meaning what?”“Meaning that there was no more to come. Meaning that creation had come to an end.”“This is what it was all leading up to”“Yes.’“Of course. Everyone in your culture knows this. The pinnacle was reached in man. Man is the climax of the whole cosmic drama of creation.”“Yes.”“When man finally appeared, creation came to an end, because its objective had been reached. There was nothing left to create.”“That seems to be the unspoken assumption.”</blockquote>Ishmael is a wise if impatient teacher and he does not simply lay out his theory of how we came to this precipice we are on, he proceeds in Socratic fashion, urging the narrator to dig out the story, and play his part in discovery, to bring out of concealment the story of our own destruction.At first I thought that the author must have read The Sixth Extinction, and was playing off of it, but if anything, it is the other way around since this novel predates the publication of The Sixth Extinction and centers more on economic history than on scientific data.In essence, the world was made for man, and man was made to rule it. But since the world would not meekly submit, man had to conquer it.<blockquote>“I’m saying that the price you’ve paid is not the price of becoming human. It’s not even the price of having the things you just mentioned. It’s the price of enacting a story that casts mankind as the enemy of the world.“</blockquote>Martin Heidegger tells a similar story in his essay, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in which he claims that the present worlding, the world we are bringing  into existence, treats nature as standing reserve, that which stands in reserve for us to use and use up. Quinn’s version of the story sis far less pompous than Heidegger’s and far more entertaining.

Ishmael by Daniel Quinn

Charmaine Wilkerson

Black Cake is a sprawling, brilliant debut novel by Charmaine Wilkerson. It is hard to believe it is a debut novel, since the writing is so rich and complex, but she has been writing for a long time. Benedetta Bennet (known as Benny), and Coventina (Covey) have been best friends for life, and their voices are two of the most important narrative voices in this novel, although there are a host of narrators representing generations of families. The chapters are split between then (1965) and now (2018). Benny and Byron, once super-close siblings have drifted apart as they matured, but the death of Eleanor Bennett, their mother, brings them together, and the narrative she has left behind for them shows them that Eleanor was not the person they or others thought she was. Benny and Byron, or B &amp; B as their mother likes to call them, have been summoned to Eleanor Bennett’s attorney’s office and are given a handwritten note and a USB drive. The note says simply “B and B, there’s a small black cake in the freezer for you. Don’t throw it out.”As Wilkerson tells us in her Author’s Note:It was my personal familiarity with a particular Caribbean food, black cake, that led obliquely to this book. It started me thinking about the emotional  weight carried by recipes and other familial markers that are handed down from one generation to the next. Then it had me writing about characters who must hold fast to their sense of self when they learn their lives have been built on a dubious narrative.What we call holiday fruit cake is as close as most of us come to black cake. But the Caribbean black cake is made with fruit that has been soaked in alcohol over long periods of times, and is especially treasured as a wedding cake.Not everyone sits down to write a book but everyone is a storyteller, in one form or other. As I wrote this novel, a lifetime of anecdotes and fleeting impressions shared by the Caribbean members of my multicultural family helped me to develop some of the fictional characters and scenarios from the 1950s and 1960s. The scenes from the unnamed island in the Caribbean reflect some of the geography and history of Jamaica...The fictional town where members of the book’s older generation grew up is inspired by the northeast coast of that island and uses a mix of actual and invented locations.Without telling you much of the story that unfolds as B and B listen to the story their mother tells them, one of the two best friends is given by her father as a bride to a much older and powerful money-lender. Benny, who is a great long-distance swimmer helps Covey to escape the island and the marriage, but must then escape and change her own identity because of the long reach of the money lender and his family.While B and B slowly learn the real history of their mother, scores of other characters are introduced. Covey eventually becomes a kind of food anthropologist telling family stories via food traditions. Benny becomes s world famous open-water distance swimmer, and eventually marries and moves to the United States.In many ways Wilkerson displays the dangers for Blacks living in white communities., and in this way the novel seems very current. A black man pulled over for a busted tail light, and while trying to get his wallet, the officer pulls a gun on him.What was the kid supposed to do if he was asked to show his driver’s license?How is a person supposed to reach for their wallet? Are black people in America not allowed to have hands?Byron would like to believe that this epidemic of mistreatment, this bullying of unarmed black men is just that, an outbreak, though prolonged, that can be brought under control. He wants to keep believing in law enforcement officers, to respect the risky work that they do, knowing that every day they step into unknown territory. He wants to know that he can still pick up the phone and call the cops if he ever needs to. There’s a lot of anger out there. A lot of hurt. Where  are they all gonna end up—black white, whoever—if things don’t get better?Good question, and Wilkerson is a master at spotlighting this and so many contemporary issues. This is a wonderful novel, one of the best I have read in the past two years, and a fitting tribute to Women’s History month. 

<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggcFQVucGwEiGeZSAprRASoNWYyq_PoGp7Fdu8vjuUfU3rx5Aj3NSkd-xsYLOq2yU8wcTbzvt4GwUZa0zVI_awERE0yvbO5cpbSQlDkPj6FHYLO8aT6wE1ftCK4yzuxzremly8kFYvArTOLOaP3qGwf8zSnUYKRNa2jsKG3d6Mo6B9J6KWnQ/s500/Black%20Cake%20by%20Charmaine%20Wilkerson.jpg" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a>Black Cake is a sprawling, brilliant debut novel by Charmaine Wilkerson. It is hard to believe it is a debut novel, since the writing is so rich and complex, but she has been writing for a long time. Benedetta Bennet (known as Benny), and Coventina (Covey) have been best friends for life, and their voices are two of the most important narrative voices in this novel, although there are a host of narrators representing generations of families. The chapters are split between then (1965) and now (2018). Benny and Byron, once super-close siblings have drifted apart as they matured, but the death of Eleanor Bennett, their mother, brings them together, and the narrative she has left behind for them shows them that Eleanor was not the person they or others thought she was. Benny and Byron, or B &amp; B as their mother likes to call them, have been summoned to Eleanor Bennett’s attorney’s office and are given a handwritten note and a USB drive. The note says simply “B and B, there’s a small black cake in the freezer for you. Don’t throw it out.”As Wilkerson tells us in her Author’s Note:<blockquote>It was my personal familiarity with a particular Caribbean food, black cake, that led obliquely to this book. It started me thinking about the emotional  weight carried by recipes and other familial markers that are handed down from one generation to the next. Then it had me writing about characters who must hold fast to their sense of self when they learn their lives have been built on a dubious narrative.</blockquote>What we call holiday fruit cake is as close as most of us come to black cake. But the Caribbean black cake is made with fruit that has been soaked in alcohol over long periods of times, and is especially treasured as a wedding cake.<blockquote>Not everyone sits down to write a book but everyone is a storyteller, in one form or other. As I wrote this novel, a lifetime of anecdotes and fleeting impressions shared by the Caribbean members of my multicultural family helped me to develop some of the fictional characters and scenarios from the 1950s and 1960s. The scenes from the unnamed island in the Caribbean reflect some of the geography and history of Jamaica...The fictional town where members of the book’s older generation grew up is inspired by the northeast coast of that island and uses a mix of actual and invented locations.</blockquote>Without telling you much of the story that unfolds as B and B listen to the story their mother tells them, one of the two best friends is given by her father as a bride to a much older and powerful money-lender. Benny, who is a great long-distance swimmer helps Covey to escape the island and the marriage, but must then escape and change her own identity because of the long reach of the money lender and his family.While B and B slowly learn the real history of their mother, scores of other characters are introduced. Covey eventually becomes a kind of food anthropologist telling family stories via food traditions. Benny becomes s world famous open-water distance swimmer, and eventually marries and moves to the United States.In many ways Wilkerson displays the dangers for Blacks living in white communities., and in this way the novel seems very current. A black man pulled over for a busted tail light, and while trying to get his wallet, the officer pulls a gun on him.<blockquote>What was the kid supposed to do if he was asked to show his driver’s license?How is a person supposed to reach for their wallet? Are black people in America not allowed to have hands?Byron would like to believe that this epidemic of mistreatment, this bullying of unarmed black men is just that, an outbreak, though prolonged, that can be brought under control. He wants to keep believing in law enforcement officers, to respect the risky work that they do, knowing that every day they step into unknown territory. He wants to know that he can still pick up the phone and call the cops if he ever needs to. There’s a lot of anger out there. A lot of hurt. Where  are they all gonna end up—black white, whoever—if things don’t get better?</blockquote>Good question, and Wilkerson is a master at spotlighting this and so many contemporary issues. This is a wonderful novel, one of the best I have read in the past two years, and a fitting tribute to Women’s History month.

Black Cake by Charmaine Wilkerson

V.E. SCHWAB

Try to imagine what it would be like to not be remembered by anyone. Adeline Larue has made the mistake of praying to the dark gods to be free and to live without fear of death. The title of this Faustian tale is The Invisible Life of Addie Larue, by V.E. Schwab.The author warns us in a prefatory note which she attributes to Estele Magritte, 1642-1719:The old gods may be great, but they are neither kind nor merciful. They are fickle , unsteady as moonlight on water, or shadows in a storm. If you insist on calling  them, take heed: be careful what you ask for, be willing to pay the price. And no matter how desperate or dire, never pray to the gods that answer after dark.I am not a big fan of fantastical literature, but this novel raises so many fascinating philosophical questions  about personal identity and its link to memory that I continued to ponder the questions long after I had finished reading the story, a story which stands on its own even without the philosophical meandering, but which is so much better as a book because of the reflections on personal identity.Adeline is a girl who lived at the cusp between 1698 and the eighteenth century. Much loved by her father, a woodworker, he always takes her with him when he takes his wares to market. “Adeline is seven, the same as the number of freckles on her face. She is bright and small and quick as a sparrow.” She continues to leave her small village three times a year to go to the city of Le Mans, but when she turns twelve, her parents decide she should no longer be allowed to go to the large town, that it is unseemly for a young girl to wander the market. “You are not a child anymore.” And Adeline understands and still does not understand at all—feels as if she’s being punished for simply growing up.And then she is sixteen and, against her will, betrothed to a man more than twice her age.I do not want to marry.“I do not want to belong to someone else,” she says with sudden vehemence.  The words are a door flung wide, and now the rest pour out of her. “ I do not want to belong to anyone but myself. I want to be free. Free to live, and to find my own way, to love, or to be alone, but at least it is my choice, and I am so tired of having no choices, so scared of the years rushing by beneath my feet.  I do not want to die as I’ve lived, which is no life at all.This she tells to a shadow, a handsome man with dark curls and green eyes, a man she comes to call Luc.The novel jumps from France in 1714 to New York City in 2014. Addie’s wish has been granted and she has lived for over three hundred years. The curse for her freedom and apparent immortality is that no one remembers her. She is forgotten simply by turning her back or walking away. If she takes a man to her bed, she knows he will awaken in the morning startled by the stranger in  bed with him. Although she can get money, usually by stealing, landlords will not rent to a lone woman. It is only when she begins to wear trousers and a buttoned coat, a hat that is pulled down over her face  that she can roam freely. The darkness claimed  he’d given her freedom, but really, there is no such thing as freedom for a woman, not in a world where they are bound up inside their clothes, and sealed inside their homes, a world where only men are given leave to roam.I will return to the story in a moment, but  let us first ask about the connection between memory and personhood. Oliver Sacks describes a man who has no short-term memory at all, but only a hazy recall of a distant past. If philosophers are right, memory is a necessary condition of personal identity, of being the same person over time. Sacks tells of tricking a client (he does not like the word “patient”) into looking into a mirror and seeing not the person he thinks himself to be, but a much older man. He is horrified and confused, and Sacks chides himself for such a cruel trick.I agree with Sacks and others that memory is crucial to personal identity. But what of Schwab’s clever trick of asking whether a person not remembered is really a person. Will they feel as Addie does, that she is really invisible because unknown.Eventually, Addie wanders into a bookstore, The Last Word, and steals a copy of The Odyssey, in Greek no less. She knows that even if the clerk sees her theft, by the time he confronts her on the street, he will have forgotten who she is and what he is doing with her. Imagine the shocked surprise when she returns to the shop a few days later asking to exchange to book for an English copy, and the clerk says, “I remember you” and scolds her for her impudence in trying now to exchange the stolen book for another. But all Addie can hear are  his words, “ I remember you.”Finally she is known, remembered, but how can this be so, how can the clerk, Henry, remember her in spite of the curse? To discover the answer to that question as well as the fates of Adeline and Henry, you will have to read the book.While this novel will more than stretch your ability to suspend disbelief, I think it will also enchant you and lead you to ask  questions about your own identity and what it depends on. 

<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhGlUDs12TmxXFoOAW7POKWIm1-4ThtuRwUslOs-FUk_s7zGD7XRNe11kmWlh1aQ_uqtehlY2CPNuUSjpWiYxj7pdvPVSeGbRucVzOGHeObPJRrlNUKpezgZBeGGh4kzzMCy5U5B4egaf8_VqS18JZV-uypefrz-it2bR_dIPLa7B0Z2WKVbw=s532" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a>Try to imagine what it would be like to not be remembered by anyone. Adeline Larue has made the mistake of praying to the dark gods to be free and to live without fear of death. The title of this Faustian tale is The Invisible Life of Addie Larue, by V.E. Schwab.The author warns us in a prefatory note which she attributes to Estele Magritte, 1642-1719:<blockquote>The old gods may be great, but they are neither kind nor merciful. They are fickle , unsteady as moonlight on water, or shadows in a storm. If you insist on calling  them, take heed: be careful what you ask for, be willing to pay the price. And no matter how desperate or dire, never pray to the gods that answer after dark.</blockquote>I am not a big fan of fantastical literature, but this novel raises so many fascinating philosophical questions  about personal identity and its link to memory that I continued to ponder the questions long after I had finished reading the story, a story which stands on its own even without the philosophical meandering, but which is so much better as a book because of the reflections on personal identity.Adeline is a girl who lived at the cusp between 1698 and the eighteenth century. Much loved by her father, a woodworker, he always takes her with him when he takes his wares to market. “Adeline is seven, the same as the number of freckles on her face. She is bright and small and quick as a sparrow.” She continues to leave her small village three times a year to go to the city of Le Mans, but when she turns twelve, her parents decide she should no longer be allowed to go to the large town, that it is unseemly for a young girl to wander the market. <blockquote>“You are not a child anymore.” And Adeline understands and still does not understand at all—feels as if she’s being punished for simply growing up.</blockquote>And then she is sixteen and, against her will, betrothed to a man more than twice her age.<blockquote>I do not want to marry.“I do not want to belong to someone else,” she says with sudden vehemence.  The words are a door flung wide, and now the rest pour out of her. “ I do not want to belong to anyone but myself. I want to be free. Free to live, and to find my own way, to love, or to be alone, but at least it is my choice, and I am so tired of having no choices, so scared of the years rushing by beneath my feet.  I do not want to die as I’ve lived, which is no life at all.</blockquote>This she tells to a shadow, a handsome man with dark curls and green eyes, a man she comes to call Luc.The novel jumps from France in 1714 to New York City in 2014. Addie’s wish has been granted and she has lived for over three hundred years. The curse for her freedom and apparent immortality is that no one remembers her. She is forgotten simply by turning her back or walking away. If she takes a man to her bed, she knows he will awaken in the morning startled by the stranger in  bed with him. Although she can get money, usually by stealing, landlords will not rent to a lone woman. It is only when she begins to wear trousers and a buttoned coat, a hat that is pulled down over her face  that she can roam freely. <blockquote>The darkness claimed  he’d given her freedom, but really, there is no such thing as freedom for a woman, not in a world where they are bound up inside their clothes, and sealed inside their homes, a world where only men are given leave to roam.</blockquote>I will return to the story in a moment, but  let us first ask about the connection between memory and personhood. Oliver Sacks describes a man who has no short-term memory at all, but only a hazy recall of a distant past. If philosophers are right, memory is a necessary condition of personal identity, of being the same person over time. Sacks tells of tricking a client (he does not like the word “patient”) into looking into a mirror and seeing not the person he thinks himself to be, but a much older man. He is horrified and confused, and Sacks chides himself for such a cruel trick.I agree with Sacks and others that memory is crucial to personal identity. But what of Schwab’s clever trick of asking whether a person not remembered is really a person. Will they feel as Addie does, that she is really invisible because unknown.Eventually, Addie wanders into a bookstore, The Last Word, and steals a copy of The Odyssey, in Greek no less. She knows that even if the clerk sees her theft, by the time he confronts her on the street, he will have forgotten who she is and what he is doing with her. Imagine the shocked surprise when she returns to the shop a few days later asking to exchange to book for an English copy, and the clerk says, “I remember you” and scolds her for her impudence in trying now to exchange the stolen book for another. But all Addie can hear are  his words, “ I remember you.”Finally she is known, remembered, but how can this be so, how can the clerk, Henry, remember her in spite of the curse? To discover the answer to that question as well as the fates of Adeline and Henry, you will have to read the book.While this novel will more than stretch your ability to suspend disbelief, I think it will also enchant you and lead you to ask  questions about your own identity and what it depends on.

The Invisible Life of Addie Larue by V.E. Schwab

Louise Fein

If you are one of the many who believe that eugenics was a tool only of Nazi Germany, you should read the excellent and thoroughly researched historical novel by Louise Fein entitled, The Hidden Child.Often, the best way of really bringing home the horrors of a practice is to embody it, to show how real people are affected by the practice. Louise Fein has done just that in her sad but wonderful novel. As Eleanor is watching over her beautiful five year old child, Mabel,  frolicking  in a park, suddenly and out of nowhere Mabel begins to act in a most frightening way. A postman has just dropped his bike in shock as he points to the beautiful child in front of him. Eleanor turns in confusion.Mabel! Sticks scattered around her, she’s sitting on the dusty ground, face twisted, her eyes weirdly rolling back. Her chin drops to her chest, once, twice, hands twitching. Eleanor’s feet are rooted to the ground in horror. Her daughter looks as though she’s been possessed, her normal sweet expression vanished behind the contorted features of her face. But this is not the first nor the last of these fits. Eleanor’s instinctive reaction is to brush of the momentary behavior, and she implores the postman not to fetch a doctor.  Besides her inclination to deny and hope the momentary aberration is just that, passing and of no significance, she is married to a psychologist who is a leader of the eugenics movement in the U.K., and who would be most embarrassed to admit his daughter is among the unfit who need to be weeded from society.Fein skillfully weaves her story. Edward, the psychologist husband, insists that Mabel’s ailment must not be discovered, both to protect the child from being singled out and ridiculed, and to protect his own reputation within the movement. He insists that it will be best for all concerned if Mabel is locked away in a sanitarium and kept from public scrutiny. Although heartbroken, Eleanor cannot stand up to her husband and his professional stature and eventually defers to his judgment. Unable even to visit her young child, she slowly becomes more and more aware that her husband sees only what he wants to see and that he even skews his research to omit  evidence that would count against his theories regarding the improvement of the race via incarceration, sterilization and other drastic measures.The story itself is compelling and so well written, but the controversy behind the theory is really the most important part of this novel. Fein, herself, has a child with epilepsy, and that no doubt adds to her careful and thorough research in writing this book. In her notes at the end of the novel:I was therefore rather shocked that when I began to look into the ideas behind the inhumane treatment of people with disabilities, including epilepsy, in the 1920s, I found , in fact, that Nazi Germany took its lead in this area from widespread and accepted eugenics ideas circulating in both the United Kingdom and the United States. The eugenics movement had been born in England in the late nineteenth century and was extremely widespread in the first thirty years or so of the twentieth century.The pseudo-science of eugenics and other theories such as craniology are thoroughly debunked by Stephen Jay Gould in his superb set of essays, The Mismeasure of Man. Like Edward in this novel, many of the experiments meant to support the theories were manipulated such that only confirmatory data was allowed and contra evidence swept under the rug. This novel and the story stand on their own quite apart from the eugenics controversy, but the social and political importance of the book  needs to be emphasized. I will end with another quote from the author’s end notes:Legislation was proposed for compulsory sterilization and incarceration of those considered “weak-minded,” a catchall phrase for those with learning difficulties as well as epileptics, criminals, those with behavioral difficulties, alcoholics and anyone else considered “undesirable” and ruinous to the health of the population in general.

<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjM9RQbzT-_kjs7b9BwX5Yqvs1apOZuj5MIHFrR36XWJfEGJaDWr_xtN6R92jHf59rc-NGwOq8aAtFFrYDnmg1aUwr9ZtmGwM-RL4cCafWV98Qm7J4ulwjZG7awXEwNb3SZgWKL9XhtyixPMtyJYrKjFVsQuWotVCL6on4pE4VZ3GA7FXzNiQ=s500" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a>If you are one of the many who believe that eugenics was a tool only of Nazi Germany, you should read the excellent and thoroughly researched historical novel by Louise Fein entitled, The Hidden Child.Often, the best way of really bringing home the horrors of a practice is to embody it, to show how real people are affected by the practice. Louise Fein has done just that in her sad but wonderful novel. As Eleanor is watching over her beautiful five year old child, Mabel,  frolicking  in a park, suddenly and out of nowhere Mabel begins to act in a most frightening way. A postman has just dropped his bike in shock as he points to the beautiful child in front of him. <blockquote>Eleanor turns in confusion.Mabel! Sticks scattered around her, she’s sitting on the dusty ground, face twisted, her eyes weirdly rolling back. Her chin drops to her chest, once, twice, hands twitching. Eleanor’s feet are rooted to the ground in horror. Her daughter looks as though she’s been possessed, her normal sweet expression vanished behind the contorted features of her face. </blockquote>But this is not the first nor the last of these fits. Eleanor’s instinctive reaction is to brush of the momentary behavior, and she implores the postman not to fetch a doctor.  Besides her inclination to deny and hope the momentary aberration is just that, passing and of no significance, she is married to a psychologist who is a leader of the eugenics movement in the U.K., and who would be most embarrassed to admit his daughter is among the unfit who need to be weeded from society.Fein skillfully weaves her story. Edward, the psychologist husband, insists that Mabel’s ailment must not be discovered, both to protect the child from being singled out and ridiculed, and to protect his own reputation within the movement. He insists that it will be best for all concerned if Mabel is locked away in a sanitarium and kept from public scrutiny. Although heartbroken, Eleanor cannot stand up to her husband and his professional stature and eventually defers to his judgment. Unable even to visit her young child, she slowly becomes more and more aware that her husband sees only what he wants to see and that he even skews his research to omit  evidence that would count against his theories regarding the improvement of the race via incarceration, sterilization and other drastic measures.The story itself is compelling and so well written, but the controversy behind the theory is really the most important part of this novel. Fein, herself, has a child with epilepsy, and that no doubt adds to her careful and thorough research in writing this book. In her notes at the end of the novel:<blockquote>I was therefore rather shocked that when I began to look into the ideas behind the inhumane treatment of people with disabilities, including epilepsy, in the 1920s, I found , in fact, that Nazi Germany took its lead in this area from widespread and accepted eugenics ideas circulating in both the United Kingdom and the United States. The eugenics movement had been born in England in the late nineteenth century and was extremely widespread in the first thirty years or so of the twentieth century.</blockquote>The pseudo-science of eugenics and other theories such as craniology are thoroughly debunked by Stephen Jay Gould in his superb set of essays, The Mismeasure of Man. Like Edward in this novel, many of the experiments meant to support the theories were manipulated such that only confirmatory data was allowed and contra evidence swept under the rug. This novel and the story stand on their own quite apart from the eugenics controversy, but the social and political importance of the book  needs to be emphasized. I will end with another quote from the author’s end notes:<blockquote>Legislation was proposed for compulsory sterilization and incarceration of those considered “weak-minded,” a catchall phrase for those with learning difficulties as well as epileptics, criminals, those with behavioral difficulties, alcoholics and anyone else considered “undesirable” and ruinous to the health of the population in general.</blockquote>

The Hidden Child by Louise Fein

Larry Bowlden reviews contemporary fiction and non-fiction as part of the Old Mole Variety Hour. Monday mornings on KBOO 90.7 fm, Portland, Oregon.

Elizabeth Strout

Believe me, I am giving nothing away by beginning my remarks by quoting the last page of Elizabeth’s Strout’s new novel, Oh WilliamAnd then I thought, Oh William!But when I think Oh William!, don’t I  mean Oh Lucy! too?Don’t I mean Oh Everyone, Oh dear Everybody in this whole wide world, we do not know anybody, not even ourselves!Except a little tiny, tiny bit we do.But we are all mythologies, mysterious. We are all mysteries, is what I mean.This may be the only thing in the world I know to be true.Strout in her unique way, again reminds us that there are no ordinary people, that everyone is extraordinary, and that the simplest of day to day events is filled with mystery.As she does in each of her novels, Strout revisits old characters. This time it is Lucy Barton who reappears. Like Strout, Lucy Barton is an author. Her most recent husband, David has died leaving her buried in grief. And she decides to tell us a few things about her first husband William with whom she has remained good friends after their divorce. They have two adult daughters together, and the two daughters have a half-sister from William’s last marriage. William has been married three times: Lucy, Joanne, and Estelle.William has been having terrifying dreams and he finds it quite natural to confide in Lucy regarding those dreams. He wonders if the dreams have simply to do with getting older. “Maybe,” I said. But I was not sure this was the reason. William has always been a mystery to me—and to our girls as well. I said, tentatively, “Do you want to see anyone to talk to about them?”Strout’s writing is so simplistic, so flat, and yet her readers understand they are being given a very wise view of the world.  At times her writing seems almost like the awkward journal jottings of a high-schooler. And yet, and yet there seem to be profound insights  about marriage, about raising children, about respecting old relationships and getting beyond petty jealousy.Both William and Lucy have had sad, lonely childhoods and few warm feelings about their mothers. There is this about my own mother:I have written about her and I really do not care to write anything else about her. But I understand one might need to know a few things for this story. The few things would be this: I have no memory of my mother ever touching any of her children except in violence. I do not remember that she ever said, I love you, Lucy. The rather complicated and often humorous plot of this novel is, I think, much less important than Lucy’s asides; asides about choice and loneliness and not being able to let go of past hurts.People are lonely, is my point here. Many people can’t say to those they know well what it is they feel they might want to say.The only other writer I can think of who is as skillful in uncovering the extraordinary in ordinary lives is Alice Munro, and like Munro who writes almost exclusively short stories, Strout makes her points in passing, in throw-off comments. Her insights cannot be easily summed up, her messages not easily articulated.I will leave you with this heart-rending quote from Lucy.There have been times—and I mean recently—when I feel the curtain of my childhood descend around me once again. A terrible enclosure, a quiet horror: This is the feeling and it was with me my entire childhood, and it came back to me with a whoosh the other day. To remember so quietly, yet vividly, to have it re-presented to me in this way, the sense of doom I grew up with, knowing I could never leave that house (except to go to school, which meant the world to me, even though I had no friends there, but I was out of the house)—to have this come back to me presented a domain of dull and terrifying dreariness to me.: There was no escape.When I was young there was no escape, is what I am saying. Oh Elizabeth, you genius story-teller, please keep writing.

<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgBQHZi7f0JQri6iomlfYLOLGBCqeHHDU2Fw88whDoGkmr3g23UFNPrIquVdStRGgVL69_n3XNiZNtZe6sIcaCj9rd3Rro3WkTdJ966CTlyjFVAzNGzkfVLOVfQvvvhKtZY4RSli0AYwAgNOCTPoCmw2eS1XNSd8FevjGMHTAGQ4GTsW1EAUg=s499" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a>Believe me, I am giving nothing away by beginning my remarks by quoting the last page of Elizabeth’s Strout’s new novel, Oh William<blockquote>And then I thought, Oh William!But when I think Oh William!, don’t I  mean Oh Lucy! too?Don’t I mean Oh Everyone, Oh dear Everybody in this whole wide world, we do not know anybody, not even ourselves!Except a little tiny, tiny bit we do.But we are all mythologies, mysterious. We are all mysteries, is what I mean.This may be the only thing in the world I know to be true.</blockquote>Strout in her unique way, again reminds us that there are no ordinary people, that everyone is extraordinary, and that the simplest of day to day events is filled with mystery.As she does in each of her novels, Strout revisits old characters. This time it is Lucy Barton who reappears. Like Strout, Lucy Barton is an author. Her most recent husband, David has died leaving her buried in grief. And she decides to tell us a few things about her first husband William with whom she has remained good friends after their divorce. They have two adult daughters together, and the two daughters have a half-sister from William’s last marriage. William has been married three times: Lucy, Joanne, and Estelle.William has been having terrifying dreams and he finds it quite natural to confide in Lucy regarding those dreams. He wonders if the dreams have simply to do with getting older. <blockquote>“Maybe,” I said. But I was not sure this was the reason. William has always been a mystery to me—and to our girls as well. I said, tentatively, “Do you want to see anyone to talk to about them?”</blockquote>Strout’s writing is so simplistic, so flat, and yet her readers understand they are being given a very wise view of the world.  At times her writing seems almost like the awkward journal jottings of a high-schooler. And yet, and yet there seem to be profound insights  about marriage, about raising children, about respecting old relationships and getting beyond petty jealousy.Both William and Lucy have had sad, lonely childhoods and few warm feelings about their mothers. <blockquote>There is this about my own mother:I have written about her and I really do not care to write anything else about her. But I understand one might need to know a few things for this story. The few things would be this: I have no memory of my mother ever touching any of her children except in violence. I do not remember that she ever said, I love you, Lucy. </blockquote>The rather complicated and often humorous plot of this novel is, I think, much less important than Lucy’s asides; asides about choice and loneliness and not being able to let go of past hurts.<blockquote>People are lonely, is my point here. Many people can’t say to those they know well what it is they feel they might want to say.</blockquote>The only other writer I can think of who is as skillful in uncovering the extraordinary in ordinary lives is Alice Munro, and like Munro who writes almost exclusively short stories, Strout makes her points in passing, in throw-off comments. Her insights cannot be easily summed up, her messages not easily articulated.I will leave you with this heart-rending quote from Lucy.<blockquote>There have been times—and I mean recently—when I feel the curtain of my childhood descend around me once again. A terrible enclosure, a quiet horror: This is the feeling and it was with me my entire childhood, and it came back to me with a whoosh the other day. To remember so quietly, yet vividly, to have it re-presented to me in this way, the sense of doom I grew up with, knowing I could never leave that house (except to go to school, which meant the world to me, even though I had no friends there, but I was out of the house)—to have this come back to me presented a domain of dull and terrifying dreariness to me.: There was no escape.When I was young there was no escape, is what I am saying. </blockquote>Oh Elizabeth, you genius story-teller, please keep writing.

Oh William by Elizabeth Strout

Tracy Chevalier

It is 1932, England and all of Europe is still under the cloud of World War I. So many men died in the war that there are thousands upon thousands of young widows or unmarried ‘spinsters’ who are dubbed ‘surplus woman', woman who will be unlikely to marry or have children. Violet Speedwell is one such woman; at thirty-eight, she has lost both her older brother and her finance, Laurence. Violet’s mother is inconsolable over the death of her oldest son, and is super-critical of her daughter, so much so that she makes Violet’s life miserable, and Violet longs to get away from her home and town where she feels suffocated by the life of caring for her aging mother.When Violet spots an ad for a typist in a nearby town, she applies, and immediately accepts the low-paying job when it is offered. When it became clear that Mrs. Speedwell was not going to see her off as she normally did, watching from the doorway until visitors were out of sight, Violet went over and kissed her on the forehead. “Good-bye, Mother” she murmured. “I’ll see you next Sunday.”Mrs. Speedwell sniffed,. “Don’t bother. I may be dead by then.”And thus Violet begins her new life, living in a boardinghouse with other young women and working long hours typing forms for an insurance company. Excited by the new freedom, she puts up with meals of sardines on toast or beans on toast. She took herself to the cinema every week—her one indulgence, which she paid for by going without a meal that day. Her life is dreary and lonely until one day she goes to the grand cathedral in Winchester and happens onto a particular service, one filled with mostly older  women. She is not at the church to pray, ”prayers had died in the war alongside George and Laurence and a nation full of young men.”It turns out to be a special mass for broderers, i.e. women who embroider seat cushions and kneelers  for the hard wooden benches of the cathedral. At first blocked from entering the group, she persists and eventually is allowed to be a part of the group. An so begins a new and much less socially impoverished  life as she befriends other broderers and comes under the very kind tutelage of Miss  Pesel, one of two women in charge of the group of women.When I picked up this novel, I knew nothing of spinning, weaving, crocheting , or embroidering, but I was fascinated by the descriptions and by the friendships between the women. Although Violet has had very limited introduction to needlework, she quickly takes to it under the watchful eye of Miss Pesel. She also becomes friends with an older man, Arthur, who is a bell-ringer for the cathedral. Arthur is married to a woman who is frail and ailing, unable to recover from the loss of her son in the war.In order to be allowed to attend the daytime broderers meetings, Violet comes up with a plan to improve efficiency in the insurance office  such that it will allow both she and Olive, the other typist to attend the meetings.“But, Miss Speedwell, I  shall say this  idea came from me, if you don’t mind,” he added with a frown. “I can’t think what management would say about a girl having such a ...progressive idea”The author, Chevalier, has such a wonderful ear for the nuances and prejudices of this time in a Europe decimated by one war and on the eve of another. Violet decides on a walking tour in the country in place of the holidays of the past spent with her mother and younger brother and his family. She has a frightening encounter with a man she calls the corn man, having met him in a cornfield and then followed by him. Having walked to Sthe small town where Arthur lives, she confides in him about the scare she has had. “ He frightened you?”“Yes” Arthur looked at her waiting.“It’s not easy being a woman on your your own,” Violet explained after a moment. “No one expects it, though there are plenty of us. The ‘surplus women’. One would think it would not be such a surprise to see a woman walk through a field, or have a cup of tea in a pub.”This is such a lovely little novel; I didn’t expect to be so intrigued by it, reading it as a kind  of respite from two rather heavy novels, but by the end, I knew I had to call it to the attention of other readers.Among the broderers, Violet becomes a special friend of Gilda, and Gilda seems to light up when yet another woman, DJ, Dorothy, shows up at meetings. When Gilda appeared—out of breath and shouting hello—DJ started,  and suddenly solidified, as if outlined by solid black. She did not stop smiling, but her eyes drifted toward the corner of the room as if to dodge attention. Gilda too seemed out of sorts, looking everywhere but at DJ, and laughing a little too brightly as she removed her cloche...Violet discovered that there was something to discover, though she did not yet understand what it was.Only Violet and eventually Miss Pesel accept the relationship between the two women.There was something around them that made them seem closer than others, although they were not actually standing closer or even looking at each other. It was like an invisible fence, penning them together.“That’s what can happen when you’re a spinster.”It was said quietly, behind Violet, one woman to another. There was sarcasm in the words and a harshness, and something like fear.. Violet comes to see just how lovely and natural the relationship between Gilda and DJ is, opening her eyes to new possibilities. 

<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgISU0nmrcAUWgNAFFxPI4uG_E-B0u3UkmjFro7LFkslcojtUJ4p9VkxEbfNuGbzqmzOYbiLC7lEBbREccfqQyShW3OQuoEGLPAoKK1cEhtGujrudtYLOJid1A5wONiyZiTEV8Fb-65KlzjghSOQhLLH0gN98M9x1n0HpqTKlt4x-l0Olpe3Q=s755" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a>It is 1932, England and all of Europe is still under the cloud of World War I. So many men died in the war that there are thousands upon thousands of young widows or unmarried ‘spinsters’ who are dubbed ‘surplus woman', woman who will be unlikely to marry or have children. Violet Speedwell is one such woman; at thirty-eight, she has lost both her older brother and her finance, Laurence. Violet’s mother is inconsolable over the death of her oldest son, and is super-critical of her daughter, so much so that she makes Violet’s life miserable, and Violet longs to get away from her home and town where she feels suffocated by the life of caring for her aging mother.When Violet spots an ad for a typist in a nearby town, she applies, and immediately accepts the low-paying job when it is offered. <blockquote>When it became clear that Mrs. Speedwell was not going to see her off as she normally did, watching from the doorway until visitors were out of sight, Violet went over and kissed her on the forehead. “Good-bye, Mother” she murmured. “I’ll see you next Sunday.”Mrs. Speedwell sniffed,. “Don’t bother. I may be dead by then.”</blockquote>And thus Violet begins her new life, living in a boardinghouse with other young women and working long hours typing forms for an insurance company. Excited by the new freedom, she puts up with meals of sardines on toast or beans on toast. <blockquote>She took herself to the cinema every week—her one indulgence, which she paid for by going without a meal that day. </blockquote>Her life is dreary and lonely until one day she goes to the grand cathedral in Winchester and happens onto a particular service, one filled with mostly older  women. She is not at the church to pray, ”prayers had died in the war alongside George and Laurence and a nation full of young men.”It turns out to be a special mass for broderers, i.e. women who embroider seat cushions and kneelers  for the hard wooden benches of the cathedral. At first blocked from entering the group, she persists and eventually is allowed to be a part of the group. An so begins a new and much less socially impoverished  life as she befriends other broderers and comes under the very kind tutelage of Miss  Pesel, one of two women in charge of the group of women.When I picked up this novel, I knew nothing of spinning, weaving, crocheting , or embroidering, but I was fascinated by the descriptions and by the friendships between the women. Although Violet has had very limited introduction to needlework, she quickly takes to it under the watchful eye of Miss Pesel. She also becomes friends with an older man, Arthur, who is a bell-ringer for the cathedral. Arthur is married to a woman who is frail and ailing, unable to recover from the loss of her son in the war.In order to be allowed to attend the daytime broderers meetings, Violet comes up with a plan to improve efficiency in the insurance office  such that it will allow both she and Olive, the other typist to attend the meetings.<blockquote>“But, Miss Speedwell, I  shall say this  idea came from me, if you don’t mind,” he added with a frown. “I can’t think what management would say about a girl having such a ...progressive idea”</blockquote>The author, Chevalier, has such a wonderful ear for the nuances and prejudices of this time in a Europe decimated by one war and on the eve of another. Violet decides on a walking tour in the country in place of the holidays of the past spent with her mother and younger brother and his family. She has a frightening encounter with a man she calls the corn man, having met him in a cornfield and then followed by him. Having walked to Sthe small town where Arthur lives, she confides in him about the scare she has had. “ He frightened you?”“Yes” Arthur looked at her waiting.<blockquote>“It’s not easy being a woman on your your own,” Violet explained after a moment. “No one expects it, though there are plenty of us. The ‘surplus women’. One would think it would not be such a surprise to see a woman walk through a field, or have a cup of tea in a pub.”</blockquote>This is such a lovely little novel; I didn’t expect to be so intrigued by it, reading it as a kind  of respite from two rather heavy novels, but by the end, I knew I had to call it to the attention of other readers.Among the broderers, Violet becomes a special friend of Gilda, and Gilda seems to light up when yet another woman, DJ, Dorothy, shows up at meetings. <blockquote>When Gilda appeared—out of breath and shouting hello—DJ started,  and suddenly solidified, as if outlined by solid black. She did not stop smiling, but her eyes drifted toward the corner of the room as if to dodge attention. Gilda too seemed out of sorts, looking everywhere but at DJ, and laughing a little too brightly as she removed her cloche...Violet discovered that there was something to discover, though she did not yet understand what it was.</blockquote>Only Violet and eventually Miss Pesel accept the relationship between the two women.<blockquote>There was something around them that made them seem closer than others, although they were not actually standing closer or even looking at each other. It was like an invisible fence, penning them together.“That’s what can happen when you’re a spinster.”</blockquote>It was said quietly, behind Violet, one woman to another. There was sarcasm in the words and a harshness, and something like fear.. Violet comes to see just how lovely and natural the relationship between Gilda and DJ is, opening her eyes to new possibilities.

A Single Thread by Tracy Chevalier

Jeff Arch

This is primarily a love story, a love triangle between two best friends and one girl loved by both. But it is an incredibly complex story full of lies and secrets. Stewart Goodman, known by all as Goody and Santamo Piccolo, known as Pick, are unlikely best friends. Goody is a quiet and reflective boy who ponders all the big questions, while Pick is brash, cynical and dismissive of all things spiritual. Laura is Pick’s girlfriend and the love of his life. The three become fast friends at the boarding school all three attend.Years after the three leave the school, a teacher, Griffin, becomes the  dean of the school, and as the story begins Griffin is felled by a stroke, and his last conscious words uttered to his secretary who sees him fall are, Pick and Goody. Throughout the book, Griffin is suspended between life and death, on life support machines. There are other characters who sometimes act as narrator, but I’m not going to try to sum up the story. The author jumps from time to time and character to character in a dizzying manner, that makes the entire novel read as a kind of stream of consciousness.I’m more interested in conveying a theme returned to again and again in the novel which I will call a struggle, a tension, between clear cold reason and spirituality. I see it as the author’s argument with himself about this tension. Much like Ian McEwan’s wonderful little novel Black Dogs, in which it is clear that McEwan favors the life of reason his philosopher brother defends , but feels the pull of  that which reason seems not able to explain. The black dogs represent the two sides; we might even say the left and right hemispheres of the brain. Plato uses a similar metaphor in his description of the tripartite soul: the black steed of passion or appetite, the white steed of spirt and reason as the charioteer.Pick has a no nonsense view of all things, while Goody seems open to all religions. At one point, Pick takes Goody to task for talking admiringly of Jesus, though Goody is a Jew.“They want you to behave a certain way,” Pick went on, “so they throw Jesus at you.  Look at history, for Christ’s sake”Goody shook his head. “It wasn’t propaganda when it started though.”“You think he was the Son of God?” Pick asked. “I didn’t think you guys were allowed to”Goody crumbled up some more hash and dropped it into the pipe bowl. “To me, Jesus is...he’s like the older brother, you know? Like the ultimate older brother”... I mean God is the father, right? Everybody at least agrees with that.“Everybody who believes in God.”Goody looked at him, to see if he could actually mean that. “Well when you’re a kid, you know, your father...he’s this powerful thing.“He’s this force,” Goody went on. “And he’s above you and he’s mysterious and everything comes from him. And then Jesus, he’s like your older brother—he explains your father to you. He’s off to the side, just a little. And from there he interprets things. So that you can understand what the hell is going on sometimes.Pick looked at him. “That’s what the Jews think?”“I don’t know what they think. Nobody ever talks about him.”While I am clearly on the side of reason and defend atheism, I have a sense for what both McEwan and Arch are wrestling with.This is a truly beautiful love story. The love between Goody and Pick is lovely and both characters are drawn fully and carefully. The love Laura has for each of the boys in turn  Is beautiful rather than trashy or deceitful. The love of Griffin for his wife and son, all of these loves are described so well. Because of the many narrators and the sudden, unannounced shifts of  time and place this is not an easy novel to follow. Added to that  is the obvious fact  that Arch is most comfortable as a screen writer, so almost all of the text is in the form of monologue or dialogue. This is just a beautiful book, and as touching an examination of the many kinds of love as i can recall. This is not a book I would have picked up as a matter of course, but it fell into my hands from one of the readers in a small group of friends who pass along books to each other, and I was deeply touched by it. In many ways Griffin, who never speaks for himself, is the glue that holds the book and the characters together. Does he survive the stroke and return to his school and his family? That is something  readers will have to determine for themselves. 

<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgfJUGjDGlJzbZ_jIGQChfFESRVl-NNTUyXTZ4xQ0TOXAuWSc-R32hMYTIlWO-CPr6GD1Pz8CrkOCHkAEUhVB-wFwzGSKsdfPpSQNLbD9eqYDd0h4QhZ1av7P5LncNsd5l5r1C2JRReu8dqwC-Dj_mFnKlN6ZavnmqxYD0Lysz1jbjp_ZFzsA=s488" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a>This is primarily a love story, a love triangle between two best friends and one girl loved by both. But it is an incredibly complex story full of lies and secrets. Stewart Goodman, known by all as Goody and Santamo Piccolo, known as Pick, are unlikely best friends. Goody is a quiet and reflective boy who ponders all the big questions, while Pick is brash, cynical and dismissive of all things spiritual. Laura is Pick’s girlfriend and the love of his life. The three become fast friends at the boarding school all three attend.Years after the three leave the school, a teacher, Griffin, becomes the  dean of the school, and as the story begins Griffin is felled by a stroke, and his last conscious words uttered to his secretary who sees him fall are, Pick and Goody. Throughout the book, Griffin is suspended between life and death, on life support machines. There are other characters who sometimes act as narrator, but I’m not going to try to sum up the story. The author jumps from time to time and character to character in a dizzying manner, that makes the entire novel read as a kind of stream of consciousness.I’m more interested in conveying a theme returned to again and again in the novel which I will call a struggle, a tension, between clear cold reason and spirituality. I see it as the author’s argument with himself about this tension. Much like <a href="https://oldmolekboo.blogspot.com/search/label/McEwan" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Ian McEwan</a>’s wonderful little novel <a href="https://oldmolekboo.blogspot.com/2010/11/black-dogs-by-ian-mcewan.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Black Dogs</a>, in which it is clear that McEwan favors the life of reason his philosopher brother defends , but feels the pull of  that which reason seems not able to explain. The black dogs represent the two sides; we might even say the left and right hemispheres of the brain. Plato uses a similar metaphor in his description of the tripartite soul: the black steed of passion or appetite, the white steed of spirt and reason as the charioteer.Pick has a no nonsense view of all things, while Goody seems open to all religions. At one point, Pick takes Goody to task for talking admiringly of Jesus, though Goody is a Jew.<blockquote>“They want you to behave a certain way,” Pick went on, “so they throw Jesus at you.  Look at history, for Christ’s sake”Goody shook his head. “It wasn’t propaganda when it started though.”“You think he was the Son of God?” Pick asked. “I didn’t think you guys were allowed to”Goody crumbled up some more hash and dropped it into the pipe bowl. “To me, Jesus is...he’s like the older brother, you know? Like the ultimate older brother”... I mean God is the father, right? Everybody at least agrees with that.“Everybody who believes in God.”Goody looked at him, to see if he could actually mean that. “Well when you’re a kid, you know, your father...he’s this powerful thing.“He’s this force,” Goody went on. “And he’s above you and he’s mysterious and everything comes from him. And then Jesus, he’s like your older brother—he explains your father to you. He’s off to the side, just a little. And from there he interprets things. So that you can understand what the hell is going on sometimes.Pick looked at him. “That’s what the Jews think?”“I don’t know what they think. Nobody ever talks about him.”</blockquote>While I am clearly on the side of reason and defend atheism, I have a sense for what both McEwan and Arch are wrestling with.This is a truly beautiful love story. The love between Goody and Pick is lovely and both characters are drawn fully and carefully. The love Laura has for each of the boys in turn  Is beautiful rather than trashy or deceitful. The love of Griffin for his wife and son, all of these loves are described so well. Because of the many narrators and the sudden, unannounced shifts of  time and place this is not an easy novel to follow. Added to that  is the obvious fact  that Arch is most comfortable as a screen writer, so almost all of the text is in the form of monologue or dialogue. This is just a beautiful book, and as touching an examination of the many kinds of love as i can recall. This is not a book I would have picked up as a matter of course, but it fell into my hands from one of the readers in a small group of friends who pass along books to each other, and I was deeply touched by it. In many ways Griffin, who never speaks for himself, is the glue that holds the book and the characters together. Does he survive the stroke and return to his school and his family? That is something  readers will have to determine for themselves.

Attachments by Jeff Arch

Gian Sardar

It’s 1979,  Olivia Murray, who is a secretary at a Los Angeles newspaper,  has aspirations of becoming a photojournalist.  Out of the blue, she has a chance to go to Iraq with her Kurdish boyfriend, ostensibly for a weeding of his cousin, but also because he needs to reunite with his family. And so begins this remarkable 2021 novel by Gian Sardar, Take What You Can Carry. In her acknowledgments at the end of the book, Sarder explains that "... Kurdistan is spread over four countries, so isolation has been both geographic as well as political." While Sardar is quick to point out that her book is a work of fiction, it is based on true events. Sardar’s father is from Kurdistan, and her mother an American. She explains that her father’s tales about his life in Kurdistan provide the kernel of the story she tells in the novel. “Growing up in Kurdistan of Iraq, my father and his family endured atrocities I could never fully capture with words.”In  many ways this novel is a love story, Olivia and her Kurdish boyfriend, Delan, find their love and their very lives in danger. Delan has called his parents in Iraq to tell them he might show up for the wedding, but they must speak in code, since the family is political, and they know the government taps their phones, and he is not sure from their coded conversation whether his mother is telling him to come, that it is relatively safe, or  whether instead she is telling him not to come, that the risks are too great. Even before his trip to Iraq, Delan agitates in the U.S to inform his friends of the plight of the Kurds in Iraq. The United States and Kissinger had encouraged and funded them in a rise against the Iraqi government, as a favor to the Shah of Iran, but abandoned them when they no longer served their purpose...They never wanted us to win. That’s what the committee found. They wanted us only to fight and keep Baghdad busy. We were a pawn. Kurds quit their jobs, school, you name it. Everyone joined in to fight and to die in a battle we were never allowed to win.More than two hundred thousand refugees when they abandoned us, when we were being slaughtered, and not one dollar of humanitarian aid from the United States. Our leader, Barzani, he begged Kissinger for the United states to help.There is a lot of drama in this novel, and I don’t intend to give much of the plot away. Delan has a brother, Soran, who is a passionate gardener, and who says he must stay out of the fray, since he has an adopted daughter, Lailan, to care for. At one point Olivia questions Soran about his habit of bathing at night. He replies:People in our family, they’ve always been political. So even in peace we had problems, Arrests. Imprisonments. But then the the kingdom was toppled in ’58  and the republic created. From then on no Kurds had peace. And the government bombed during the day.” He stops, as if this is all that needs to be said, but then sees that’s not the case. “Imagine, not having clothes on when the sirens go  off or when the ground starts to shake and you have to run. Imagine soap in your hair when you see the shadow of the plane.We learned to live at night. To work, to bathe. When the time came, you had to run. Take what you can carry to the mountains. That is where we would go. The mountains to be safe.Olivia learns to hear the common saying, Head for the Hills, in a new light.Juxtaposed with the harrowing arrests and raids and constant fear, Sardar manages also to describe the colors and sounds and smells of Iraq, and to understand the history of that ancient land. She describes the vibrant colors of the dresses at the wedding they attend, so different than the bland whites of American weddings. In the field, she catches a flash of silver: the bride’s sisters and friends are dancing with knives. “They’re dancing with knives” He turns “They’re about to cut the cake. That’s to let him know they can handle knives. That he should be good to their sister. That they will protect her. There is so much color and excitement in this novel, and while it is often sad and frightening, there are also moments of great beauty and courage. Delan is known for his spontaneous kindness and generosity which is often impulsive and even dangerous. But one of his acts of kindness, turns out to save the family when there is an attack by government forces. This incident is one that Sardar explains is based on a real events in her Kurdish father’s life.This is a wonderful book and I am so grateful that it fell into my hands. I was all set to review a different book, The Five Wounds, by, KIrstin Valdez Quade. But I read that book weeks ago, and it was already vanishing from memory, so I decided on this novel that I had just finished. 

<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-7QMEx5g7TCA/YSvGbyBuldI/AAAAAAAAFkI/AMYNA0S8vdIUtFa-xDfCaPCXP13859XSACLcBGAsYHQ/s619/Take%2BWhat%2BYou%2BCan%2BCarry.jpg" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a>It’s 1979,  Olivia Murray, who is a secretary at a Los Angeles newspaper,  has aspirations of becoming a photojournalist.  Out of the blue, she has a chance to go to Iraq with her Kurdish boyfriend, ostensibly for a weeding of his cousin, but also because he needs to reunite with his family. And so begins this remarkable 2021 novel by Gian Sardar, Take What You Can Carry. In her acknowledgments at the end of the book, Sarder explains that "... Kurdistan is spread over four countries, so isolation has been both geographic as well as political." While Sardar is quick to point out that her book is a work of fiction, it is based on true events. Sardar’s father is from Kurdistan, and her mother an American. She explains that her father’s tales about his life in Kurdistan provide the kernel of the story she tells in the novel. “Growing up in Kurdistan of Iraq, my father and his family endured atrocities I could never fully capture with words.”In  many ways this novel is a love story, Olivia and her Kurdish boyfriend, Delan, find their love and their very lives in danger. Delan has called his parents in Iraq to tell them he might show up for the wedding, but they must speak in code, since the family is political, and they know the government taps their phones, and he is not sure from their coded conversation whether his mother is telling him to come, that it is relatively safe, or  whether instead she is telling him not to come, that the risks are too great. Even before his trip to Iraq, Delan agitates in the U.S to inform his friends of the plight of the Kurds in Iraq. <blockquote>The United States and Kissinger had encouraged and funded them in a rise against the Iraqi government, as a favor to the Shah of Iran, but abandoned them when they no longer served their purpose...They never wanted us to win. That’s what the committee found. They wanted us only to fight and keep Baghdad busy. We were a pawn. Kurds quit their jobs, school, you name it. Everyone joined in to fight and to die in a battle we were never allowed to win.More than two hundred thousand refugees when they abandoned us, when we were being slaughtered, and not one dollar of humanitarian aid from the United States. Our leader, Barzani, he begged Kissinger for the United states to help.</blockquote>There is a lot of drama in this novel, and I don’t intend to give much of the plot away. Delan has a brother, Soran, who is a passionate gardener, and who says he must stay out of the fray, since he has an adopted daughter, Lailan, to care for. At one point Olivia questions Soran about his habit of bathing at night. He replies:<blockquote>People in our family, they’ve always been political. So even in peace we had problems, Arrests. Imprisonments. But then the the kingdom was toppled in ’58  and the republic created. From then on no Kurds had peace. And the government bombed during the day.” He stops, as if this is all that needs to be said, but then sees that’s not the case. “Imagine, not having clothes on when the sirens go  off or when the ground starts to shake and you have to run. Imagine soap in your hair when you see the shadow of the plane.</blockquote><blockquote>We learned to live at night. To work, to bathe. When the time came, you had to run. Take what you can carry to the mountains. That is where we would go. The mountains to be safe.</blockquote>Olivia learns to hear the common saying, Head for the Hills, in a new light.Juxtaposed with the harrowing arrests and raids and constant fear, Sardar manages also to describe the colors and sounds and smells of Iraq, and to understand the history of that ancient land. She describes the vibrant colors of the dresses at the wedding they attend, so different than the bland whites of American weddings. <blockquote>In the field, she catches a flash of silver: the bride’s sisters and friends are dancing with knives. “They’re dancing with knives” He turns “They’re about to cut the cake. That’s to let him know they can handle knives. That he should be good to their sister. That they will protect her. </blockquote>There is so much color and excitement in this novel, and while it is often sad and frightening, there are also moments of great beauty and courage. Delan is known for his spontaneous kindness and generosity which is often impulsive and even dangerous. But one of his acts of kindness, turns out to save the family when there is an attack by government forces. This incident is one that Sardar explains is based on a real events in her Kurdish father’s life.This is a wonderful book and I am so grateful that it fell into my hands. I was all set to review a different book, The Five Wounds, by, KIrstin Valdez Quade. But I read that book weeks ago, and it was already vanishing from memory, so I decided on this novel that I had just finished.

Take What You Can Carry by Gian Sardar

Gabriela Garcia’s 2021 debut novel is really a collection of interconnected stories, spanning several generations of women. The first story is about women cigar rollers in pre-Castro Cuba.The air thickened. Maria Isabel had by then breathed so much tobacco dusts she developed regular nosebleeds, but the foreman didn’t permit workers to open the window slats more than a sliver—sunlight would dry the cigars. So she hid her cough. She was the only woman in the workshop. She didn’t want to appear weak.A quick overview: Carmen came from Cuba to the U.S., and has always felt displaced. Her daughter, Jeanette, is addicted to drugs, and is determined to find out more about family history, and thus goes from Miami to Cuba to learn  more from her grandmother  than her very reticent mother will tell her. Carmen has taken in the daughter of neighbor who has been detained by ICE. Jeanette travels to Cuba and the stories of the three women unravel in  snippets via the stories of women who write down their histories. Once in Cuba, now under Castro, she begins to hear or read the stories. Study has become a habit among them; today they leave behind the cockfight in order to read a newspaper or book; now they scorn the bullring; today it is the theater the library, and the centers of good association where they are seen in constant attendance.While the author is quite willing to expose the difficulties of the poor in Castro’s Cuba (and the racism that is denied, and claimed to be only an American problem), she makes it clear that most are much better off than before when American corporations took from Cuba its wealth of natural goods and gave back little.The grandmother in Cuba has seen the brutal treatment of those who shout for change. She sees the coming revolution that is born of blood and poverty.  Married to a disenchanted intellectual who joins the struggle, she is denied access to the group of agitators once he knows she is pregnant. She placed one hand on her belly and felt the something  in her move and stretch as if seeking its freedom, felt as if the whole world were her womb. She wanted to write her own words. She wanted to write her life into existence and endure. Perhaps a piece of her knew death crouched close.While much of the book is concerned with the political struggles that led to the overthrow of corrupt, American controlled dictators, and then the new set of problem under Castro, the author is also swept away by the incredible natural beauty of Cuba. In a chapter titled “An Encyclopedia of Birds”, the birds a metaphor for captivity and the struggle for flight and freedom:The burrowing parrot also known as the Patagonian conure also as the burrowing parakeet is the only bird species with eyelashes. This is a little-known fact. Another little-known fact is that burrowing parrots, while often purchased as pets, become exasperated if caged too long. Burrowing parrots need interaction. They need color. If you separate two burrowing parrots, in short order the one left behind will die. She will die of loneliness.Birds fly even if it kills them.She speaks of the baby jails where the children of deportees are kept, and of the children’s crayon drawings of birds, there is no sun in the drawings. I don’t know what you remember, but they didn’t tell us where they were taking us. I thought we were going before a judge finally. I thought I could argue my case, my credible fear. I had practiced. Instead they boarded us onto a bus with bars on the windows and dropped us off in Mexico. We were Salvadoran by nationality but Mexico was just a few hours away, and that’s where we’d come from , so there they left us. Said, Find you way home. We were supposed to be turned over to Mexican immigration officials, but I guess they didn’t show up. Or they thought we were Mexican.Story after story about women and children. Jeanette had added her own words, We are more than we think we are. I will leave you with the last words of the book which sum up the author’s view well.And though Ana had no idea why Jeanette had written those words, she chose to believe the sentence, the scribble, was a cry across time. Women? Certain women? We are more than we think we are. There was always more. She had no idea what else life would ask of her, force out of her, but right then  there was cake and candles and this, a gift. She thought that she, too, might give away the book someday, though she had no idea to whom. Someone who reminded her of herself maybe. Someone drawn to stories.Garcia is a wonderful story-teller, and she understands the power of stories. 

<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-iKlsKPBjZOQ/YOyFFVqIeiI/AAAAAAAAFjg/IbzxB6px0FQrGGuQ85awekuk-FLU1QrnACLcBGAsYHQ/s510/Of%2BWomen%2Band%2BSalt.jpg" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a>Gabriela Garcia’s 2021 debut novel is really a collection of interconnected stories, spanning several generations of women. The first story is about women cigar rollers in pre-Castro Cuba.<blockquote>The air thickened. Maria Isabel had by then breathed so much tobacco dusts she developed regular nosebleeds, but the foreman didn’t permit workers to open the window slats more than a sliver—sunlight would dry the cigars. So she hid her cough. She was the only woman in the workshop. She didn’t want to appear weak.</blockquote>A quick overview: Carmen came from Cuba to the U.S., and has always felt displaced. Her daughter, Jeanette, is addicted to drugs, and is determined to find out more about family history, and thus goes from Miami to Cuba to learn  more from her grandmother  than her very reticent mother will tell her. Carmen has taken in the daughter of neighbor who has been detained by ICE. Jeanette travels to Cuba and the stories of the three women unravel in  snippets via the stories of women who write down their histories. Once in Cuba, now under Castro, she begins to hear or read the stories. <blockquote>Study has become a habit among them; today they leave behind the cockfight in order to read a newspaper or book; now they scorn the bullring; today it is the theater the library, and the centers of good association where they are seen in constant attendance.</blockquote>While the author is quite willing to expose the difficulties of the poor in Castro’s Cuba (and the racism that is denied, and claimed to be only an American problem), she makes it clear that most are much better off than before when American corporations took from Cuba its wealth of natural goods and gave back little.The grandmother in Cuba has seen the brutal treatment of those who shout for change. She sees the coming revolution that is born of blood and poverty.  Married to a disenchanted intellectual who joins the struggle, she is denied access to the group of agitators once he knows she is pregnant. <blockquote>She placed one hand on her belly and felt the something  in her move and stretch as if seeking its freedom, felt as if the whole world were her womb. She wanted to write her own words. She wanted to write her life into existence and endure. Perhaps a piece of her knew death crouched close.</blockquote>While much of the book is concerned with the political struggles that led to the overthrow of corrupt, American controlled dictators, and then the new set of problem under Castro, the author is also swept away by the incredible natural beauty of Cuba. In a chapter titled “An Encyclopedia of Birds”, the birds a metaphor for captivity and the struggle for flight and freedom:<blockquote>The burrowing parrot also known as the Patagonian conure also as the burrowing parakeet is the only bird species with eyelashes. This is a little-known fact. Another little-known fact is that burrowing parrots, while often purchased as pets, become exasperated if caged too long. Burrowing parrots need interaction. They need color. If you separate two burrowing parrots, in short order the one left behind will die. She will die of loneliness.</blockquote>Birds fly even if it kills them.She speaks of the baby jails where the children of deportees are kept, and of the children’s crayon drawings of birds, there is no sun in the drawings. <blockquote>I don’t know what you remember, but they didn’t tell us where they were taking us. I thought we were going before a judge finally. I thought I could argue my case, my credible fear. I had practiced. Instead they boarded us onto a bus with bars on the windows and dropped us off in Mexico. We were Salvadoran by nationality but Mexico was just a few hours away, and that’s where we’d come from , so there they left us. Said, Find you way home. We were supposed to be turned over to Mexican immigration officials, but I guess they didn’t show up. Or they thought we were Mexican.</blockquote>Story after story about women and children. Jeanette had added her own words, We are more than we think we are. I will leave you with the last words of the book which sum up the author’s view well.And though Ana had no idea why Jeanette had written those words, she chose to believe the sentence, the scribble, was a cry across time. Women? Certain women? We are more than we think we are. There was always more. She had no idea what else life would ask of her, force out of her, but right then  there was cake and candles and this, a gift. She thought that she, too, might give away the book someday, though she had no idea to whom. Someone who reminded her of herself maybe. Someone drawn to stories.Garcia is a wonderful story-teller, and she understands the power of stories.

Of Women and Salt by Gabriela Garcia

Jess Walter

What Jess Walter shows us in his 2020 novel The Cold Millions is that he is a wonderful story-teller, a fine historian, and like one of his characters guilty of “first-degree aggravated empathy.”This lovely historical novel is on one hand simply a story of the love between two brothers, Gig and Rye Dolan who hop freight trains together, traveling from town to town and job to job. They are part of the cold millions, that is, the millions upon millions of workers who struggle day to day simply to live, while a few wealthy owners live lives of almost unfathomable wealth and luxury.While Walter is quick to inform  us in his afterward that this is a book of fiction, he also makes it clear that some of his characters are based on real life people, one of whom, is “the great labor organizer, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn”,  a key character in the book. Gurley is a mesmerizing and powerful speaker and organizer. Even the skeptics listen when she speaks.Listen brothers and sisters, have we ever seen such trying times? She went through a list of outrages, fifteen-hour workdays and women dying at their sewing machine, men crushed in cave-ins while their families got nothing, copper kings and shipping magnates living like royalty while poor workers couldn’t even afford a flop bed, families in tents and hovels, workers given no rights and tossed aside when they were too broken or sick or old to work.Clearly Walter shares the sense of outrage expressed by Flynn. He tells us that his own father was a union man. Gig, the older brother joins the IWW, although he discourages his brother Rye from getting involved. While Walter’s sympathies are clearly with the so-called Wobblies, he carries on a kind of debate regarding the efficacy of their non-violent methods. One character, Early Reston, clearly thinks non-violent methods will not work, and that rather than piecemeal reform the whole structure must be blown apart. At times in the book both Gig and Ryan become disenchanted with the methods of the IWW.Rye felt demoralized. It didn’t matter what he did, what Gurley did, what Fred Moore did, what any of them did. Somewhere there was a roomful of wealthy old men where everything was decided. Beliefs and convictions, lives and livelihoods, right and wrong—these had no place in that room, the scurrying of ants at the feet of a few rich men.It made me think that Early Reston was right, in his way ... that maybe it was the castle that needed to be blown up...While it is clearly the struggles between owners and labor that is the focus of this novel, the side stories are also fascinating. The story of Ursula the Great, a performer who enters a cage with a full grown cougar, and then strips to near nudity as the crowd looks on partly horrified, partly titillated.  There is also a sweet tale of budding love Rye feels for Gurley, although she is married and pregnant, and nothing comes of it.I much appreciated the argument Walter has with himself throughout the book regarding the possibility of real change and the methods that can achieve it. At one point when Rye is called out as one of the Wobblies by a salesman:Rye didn’t answer. But at that moment, he felt done with it all—done with the beatings, done with Taft, done with Lem Brand and Ursula, done pretending they could stand on soapboxes and draw justice out of the air. Early was right. Rye didn’t believe in anything but a job, a bed, some soup. If you read this novel, be sure to leave some good reading energy for the acknowledgments and the short closing essay by Walter: “The Undercurrents of History”.  Walter talks of his own growing up in Spokane, Washington, and of how “The World came to me in books.”With The Cold Millions, I set out to write about the sort of working-class Spokane family in which I had grown up. My dad’s father, a rancher named Jess Walter, first arrived in Eastern Washington on a train he’d hopped as a vagrant field-worker; my mother’s dad, Ralph, was an itinerant laborer in the 1930s who later died on a construction site when a crane fell on him. My own father, Alfa Bruce Walter, was a lifetime steelworker and union leader who worked almost forty years in an aluminum rolling mill.For those readers who want to go to original historical sources, Walter provides an extensive list of his own sources in addition to his personal experience. For all who have labored, and for all who feel keenly the injustices of the world, this is a must read, and it is also a wonderful story.

<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-eE7Y00HHw40/YLRQzX_eIVI/AAAAAAAAFiM/U6xOLjSS2EsJf5ysfBNtsAScTRX0G4kKgCLcBGAsYHQ/s481/Cold%2BMillions.png" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a>What Jess Walter shows us in his 2020 novel The Cold Millions is that he is a wonderful story-teller, a fine historian, and like one of his characters guilty of “first-degree aggravated empathy.”This lovely historical novel is on one hand simply a story of the love between two brothers, Gig and Rye Dolan who hop freight trains together, traveling from town to town and job to job. They are part of the cold millions, that is, the millions upon millions of workers who struggle day to day simply to live, while a few wealthy owners live lives of almost unfathomable wealth and luxury.While Walter is quick to inform  us in his afterward that this is a book of fiction, he also makes it clear that some of his characters are based on real life people, one of whom, is “the great labor organizer, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn”,  a key character in the book. Gurley is a mesmerizing and powerful speaker and organizer. Even the skeptics listen when she speaks.<blockquote>Listen brothers and sisters, have we ever seen such trying times? She went through a list of outrages, fifteen-hour workdays and women dying at their sewing machine, men crushed in cave-ins while their families got nothing, copper kings and shipping magnates living like royalty while poor workers couldn’t even afford a flop bed, families in tents and hovels, workers given no rights and tossed aside when they were too broken or sick or old to work.</blockquote>Clearly Walter shares the sense of outrage expressed by Flynn. He tells us that his own father was a union man. Gig, the older brother joins the IWW, although he discourages his brother Rye from getting involved. While Walter’s sympathies are clearly with the so-called Wobblies, he carries on a kind of debate regarding the efficacy of their non-violent methods. One character, Early Reston, clearly thinks non-violent methods will not work, and that rather than piecemeal reform the whole structure must be blown apart. At times in the book both Gig and Ryan become disenchanted with the methods of the IWW.<blockquote>Rye felt demoralized. It didn’t matter what he did, what Gurley did, what Fred Moore did, what any of them did. Somewhere there was a roomful of wealthy old men where everything was decided. Beliefs and convictions, lives and livelihoods, right and wrong—these had no place in that room, the scurrying of ants at the feet of a few rich men.It made me think that Early Reston was right, in his way ... that maybe it was the castle that needed to be blown up...</blockquote>While it is clearly the struggles between owners and labor that is the focus of this novel, the side stories are also fascinating. The story of Ursula the Great, a performer who enters a cage with a full grown cougar, and then strips to near nudity as the crowd looks on partly horrified, partly titillated.  There is also a sweet tale of budding love Rye feels for Gurley, although she is married and pregnant, and nothing comes of it.I much appreciated the argument Walter has with himself throughout the book regarding the possibility of real change and the methods that can achieve it. At one point when Rye is called out as one of the Wobblies by a salesman:<blockquote>Rye didn’t answer. But at that moment, he felt done with it all—done with the beatings, done with Taft, done with Lem Brand and Ursula, done pretending they could stand on soapboxes and draw justice out of the air. Early was right. Rye didn’t believe in anything but a job, a bed, some soup. </blockquote>If you read this novel, be sure to leave some good reading energy for the acknowledgments and the short closing essay by Walter: “The Undercurrents of History”.  Walter talks of his own growing up in Spokane, Washington, and of how “The World came to me in books.”<blockquote>With The Cold Millions, I set out to write about the sort of working-class Spokane family in which I had grown up. My dad’s father, a rancher named Jess Walter, first arrived in Eastern Washington on a train he’d hopped as a vagrant field-worker; my mother’s dad, Ralph, was an itinerant laborer in the 1930s who later died on a construction site when a crane fell on him. My own father, Alfa Bruce Walter, was a lifetime steelworker and union leader who worked almost forty years in an aluminum rolling mill.</blockquote>For those readers who want to go to original historical sources, Walter provides an extensive list of his own sources in addition to his personal experience. For all who have labored, and for all who feel keenly the injustices of the world, this is a must read, and it is also a wonderful story.

The Cold Millions by Jess Walter

Walter Mosley

Easy Rawlins is a tough and hard-boiled as  any detective in the mystery genre. He has been asked by a Viet Nam vet to look into a possible murder in a southern California orange grove.I would have turned him down out of hand if it weren’t for my understanding of the America I both love and loathe.In America everything is about either race or money or some combination of the two., Who you are, what you have, what you look like, where your people came from, and what god looked over their breed--these were the most important questions. Added into that is the race of men and the race of women. The rich, famous, and powerful believe they have a race and the poor know for a fact that they do. The thing about it is that most people have more than one race. White people have Italian, Germans, Irish, Poles, English, Scots, Portuguese, Russian, old-world Spaniard, new-world rich, and many combination thereof. Black people have a color scheme from high yellow to moonless night, from octoroon to deepest Congo. And new-world Spanish have every nation from Mexico to Puerto Rico, from Columbia to Venezuela, each of which is a race of its own--not to mention the empires, from Aztec to Mayan to Olmec. I’m a black man closer to Mississippi midnight than its yellow moon. Also I’m a westerner, a Californian formerly from the South–Louisiana and Texas to be exact. I’m a father, a reader, a private detective, and a veteran.In his most recent novel, Blood Grove, WalterMosley lets Easy describe the America of the 1960s in which a black detective is a rarity. In lieu of payment from a client, Easy is given a yearlong lease of a pale yellow, 1968 Rolls-Royce Phantom VI which will become his at the end of that year unless he is paid sixty thousand dollars. Since he has a written contract showing he has the right to drive such a fine car, he decides to drive into Beverly Hills. I had even made it a block or two past that when the flashing red lights appeared in the exta-wide rearview mirror. It was one of those wake-up calls that happen in the lives of black men and women in America when they mistakenly believe they have crossed over to freedom.I pulled to the curb, put both hands on the steering wheel, and sat patiently awaiting the rendering of the calculation of my situation. That equation was a matter of simple addition: Rolls-Royce + black man without driver’s cap + any day of the century = stop and frisk, question and dominate—and, like the solution of pi, that process had the potential of going on forever.The whole process took about half and hour. If I added up all the half hours the police, security forces, MPs, bureaucrats, bank tellers, and even gas station attendants had stolen from my life, I could make me a twelve-year-old boy versed in useless questions, meaningless insults, and spite as thick as black tar.Although the story told in Blood Grove is a detailed and interesting one, what I find much more interesting is the social commentary Mosley provides along the way. Easy quickly garages the Rolls and borrows a plain blue car, knowing that the he will be unable to drive the Rolls to do his business without daily repeats of being pulled over and questioned or worse.In this, his newest novel, Mosley adds an ingredient he had touched on in an earlier novel Little Green, his fasciation with counter-culture youth. Driving west down the Strip was slow going, but I liked the streets filled with hippies, head shops and discos. There was what they were calling a cultural revolution going on among the youth of America. They wanted to drop out and end the war, make love for its own sake, and forget the prejudices of the past. These long-haired, dope-smoking, often unemployed wanderers gave me insight into what my country, MY COUNTRY might be.. There is the usual cast of characters in this novel: Easy’s adopted children, Jesus and Feather, the dangerous best friend Raymond, called Mouse, who is usually called in to do the dirty work for Easy, a couple of good cops who help Easy obtain information and get him out of scrapes with the law. After many harrowing adventures, Easy helps the Viet Nam vet and solves the mystery, giving the reader his summation of Easy’s reflections on the state of the world. Nineteen sixty-nine was an interesting year. There was strong anti-war action from the colleges and universities and all kinds of black political insurgence. The sleeping giant of white guilt was awakening and there seemed to be some hope for the future. If you were innocent enough, or ignorant enough, you might have believed that things were improving in such a way that all Americans could expect a fair shake.But of my many flaws, neither innocence nor ignorance played a part.It seems to me that it is easier to describe and call out racial injustice as a writer of fiction than as a social scientist or reporter. Walter Mosley describes things as he sees them, and he does so with the direct experience of what it is like to be black and poor in America. He also understands how racism and sexism are connected, and he blows the whistle loudly and clearly. If you, like many readers I know, have read Devil in a Blue Dress, but not others of Mosley’s many novels, I recommend them all to you as wonderfully told stories and stark pieces of social commentary

<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-hZ2EUQhOw0g/YKgbUMb0hoI/AAAAAAAAFiE/MzuP3bLEKFAmWlS7SgbIehqQYNwGiTIWACLcBGAsYHQ/s596/Blood%2BGrove.jpg" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a>Easy Rawlins is a tough and hard-boiled as  any detective in the mystery genre. He has been asked by a Viet Nam vet to look into a possible murder in a southern California orange grove.<blockquote>I would have turned him down out of hand if it weren’t for my understanding of the America I both love and loathe.In America everything is about either race or money or some combination of the two., Who you are, what you have, what you look like, where your people came from, and what god looked over their breed--these were the most important questions. Added into that is the race of men and the race of women. The rich, famous, and powerful believe they have a race and the poor know for a fact that they do. The thing about it is that most people have more than one race. White people have Italian, Germans, Irish, Poles, English, Scots, Portuguese, Russian, old-world Spaniard, new-world rich, and many combination thereof. Black people have a color scheme from high yellow to moonless night, from octoroon to deepest Congo. And new-world Spanish have every nation from Mexico to Puerto Rico, from Columbia to Venezuela, each of which is a race of its own--not to mention the empires, from Aztec to Mayan to Olmec. I’m a black man closer to Mississippi midnight than its yellow moon. Also I’m a westerner, a Californian formerly from the South–Louisiana and Texas to be exact. I’m a father, a reader, a private detective, and a veteran.</blockquote>In his most recent novel, Blood Grove, WalterMosley lets Easy describe the America of the 1960s in which a black detective is a rarity. In lieu of payment from a client, Easy is given a yearlong lease of a pale yellow, 1968 Rolls-Royce Phantom VI which will become his at the end of that year unless he is paid sixty thousand dollars. Since he has a written contract showing he has the right to drive such a fine car, he decides to drive into Beverly Hills. <blockquote>I had even made it a block or two past that when the flashing red lights appeared in the exta-wide rearview mirror. It was one of those wake-up calls that happen in the lives of black men and women in America when they mistakenly believe they have crossed over to freedom.I pulled to the curb, put both hands on the steering wheel, and sat patiently awaiting the rendering of the calculation of my situation. That equation was a matter of simple addition: Rolls-Royce + black man without driver’s cap + any day of the century = stop and frisk, question and dominate—and, like the solution of pi, that process had the potential of going on forever.The whole process took about half and hour. If I added up all the half hours the police, security forces, MPs, bureaucrats, bank tellers, and even gas station attendants had stolen from my life, I could make me a twelve-year-old boy versed in useless questions, meaningless insults, and spite as thick as black tar.</blockquote>Although the story told in Blood Grove is a detailed and interesting one, what I find much more interesting is the social commentary Mosley provides along the way. Easy quickly garages the Rolls and borrows a plain blue car, knowing that the he will be unable to drive the Rolls to do his business without daily repeats of being pulled over and questioned or worse.In this, his newest novel, Mosley adds an ingredient he had touched on in an earlier novel Little Green, his fasciation with counter-culture youth. <blockquote>Driving west down the Strip was slow going, but I liked the streets filled with hippies, head shops and discos. There was what they were calling a cultural revolution going on among the youth of America. They wanted to drop out and end the war, make love for its own sake, and forget the prejudices of the past. These long-haired, dope-smoking, often unemployed wanderers gave me insight into what my country, MY COUNTRY might be.. </blockquote>There is the usual cast of characters in this novel: Easy’s adopted children, Jesus and Feather, the dangerous best friend Raymond, called Mouse, who is usually called in to do the dirty work for Easy, a couple of good cops who help Easy obtain information and get him out of scrapes with the law. After many harrowing adventures, Easy helps the Viet Nam vet and solves the mystery, giving the reader his summation of Easy’s reflections on the state of the world. <blockquote>Nineteen sixty-nine was an interesting year. There was strong anti-war action from the colleges and universities and all kinds of black political insurgence. The sleeping giant of white guilt was awakening and there seemed to be some hope for the future. If you were innocent enough, or ignorant enough, you might have believed that things were improving in such a way that all Americans could expect a fair shake.But of my many flaws, neither innocence nor ignorance played a part.</blockquote>It seems to me that it is easier to describe and call out racial injustice as a writer of fiction than as a social scientist or reporter. Walter Mosley describes things as he sees them, and he does so with the direct experience of what it is like to be black and poor in America. He also understands how racism and sexism are connected, and he blows the whistle loudly and clearly. If you, like many readers I know, have read Devil in a Blue Dress, but not others of Mosley’s many novels, I recommend them all to you as wonderfully told stories and stark pieces of social commentary

Blood Grove by Walter Mosley

Pam Jenoff

I know next to nothing about circuses or aerialists, but reading Pam Jenoff’s fascinating novel, The Orphan’s Tale has me wanting to know lots more about both. This novel is about two women who, for very different reasons are on the run during WWII. Noa is a young woman whose parents have kicked her out of her home because of an unwed pregnancy. The girls’ home where I lived after my parents found out I was expecting and kicked me out had been located far from anywhere in the name of discretion and they could have dropped me off in Mainz, or at least the nearest town. They simply opened the door, though, dismissing me on foot. I’d headed to the train station before realizing that I had nowhere to go.When her very non-Aryan son is born with dark eyes and olive skin, she is not allowed even to hold him, before he is whisked away. Working as a cleaner in the railway station, she lives in a tiny storage room. One night she hears a sound coming from a boxcar. “The sound continues to grow, almost a keening now, like a wounded animal in the brush.” When she slides the door of the boxcar open, “There are babies, tiny bodies too many to count, lying on the hay-covered floor of the railcar, packed close and atop one another. Most do not move and I can’t tell whether they are dead or sleeping” But one baby has woven booties on and on impulse, she grabs the now crying baby and takes it to the little storage closet where she sleeps. Once she realizes there is no way she can keep the child and still do her job, she runs away with it.The second woman, Astrid, is Jewish and comes from a circus family. She is married to German officer who turns her out to save his career. Although her family circus is no longer together and, for all she knows, has been arrested or killed by the Nazis, another circus shelters her and takes her on as an aerialist, a trapeze artist. Noa stumbles onto the circus as she runs from the police, and she, too, is taken in by the kind circus owner, both she and her stolen baby given shelter. The two women with such completely different backgrounds start a relationship that begins in hostility but blossoms over time into a wonderful friendship.I will not give away much more of the story here except to say that Astrid trains Noa to become an aerialist and both travel by rail with the circus into Nazi occupied France. As we learn from the author in her afterward remarks, the kernel of the novel begins from her reading two stories, one about a boxcar full of babies, “ripped from their families and headed for a concentration camp, too young to know their own names,” the Unknown Children. And the second about a German circus that sheltered Jews during the war. The author obviously researched extensively about circuses in general and about The Circus Althoff in particular. The reader is treated to long descriptions of how the circus travels from town to town, set up from scratch at each location. We readers are also given hair-raising descriptions of how the aerialists perform protected only by their skill and very inadequate nets. While it is obvious that author Jenoff mainly wants to tell the story of how Jews were sheltered by German circuses, she develops her characters carefully and fully so the story, itself, is fascinating quite aside from its political and moral messages.I am told by reader friends that there is a large circus community in Portland, and I find myself driven to learn more about the history of circuses and aerialists. This is love story of the very best sort; it is heartwarming and frightening in equal measures. Although a fairly long novel, I predict that most readers will read it in a sitting or two. Once started it is hard to put down.

<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-kxJqYLzFay8/YKgOzrzuBNI/AAAAAAAAFh8/fpg-Iw_GhlM5Fc68-bNqOk3RrnGWtuO0wCLcBGAsYHQ/s500/Orphans-Tale.jpg" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a>I know next to nothing about circuses or aerialists, but reading Pam Jenoff’s fascinating novel, The Orphan’s Tale has me wanting to know lots more about both. This novel is about two women who, for very different reasons are on the run during WWII. Noa is a young woman whose parents have kicked her out of her home because of an unwed pregnancy. <blockquote>The girls’ home where I lived after my parents found out I was expecting and kicked me out had been located far from anywhere in the name of discretion and they could have dropped me off in Mainz, or at least the nearest town. They simply opened the door, though, dismissing me on foot. I’d headed to the train station before realizing that I had nowhere to go.</blockquote>When her very non-Aryan son is born with dark eyes and olive skin, she is not allowed even to hold him, before he is whisked away. Working as a cleaner in the railway station, she lives in a tiny storage room. One night she hears a sound coming from a boxcar. “The sound continues to grow, almost a keening now, like a wounded animal in the brush.” When she slides the door of the boxcar open, “There are babies, tiny bodies too many to count, lying on the hay-covered floor of the railcar, packed close and atop one another. Most do not move and I can’t tell whether they are dead or sleeping” But one baby has woven booties on and on impulse, she grabs the now crying baby and takes it to the little storage closet where she sleeps. Once she realizes there is no way she can keep the child and still do her job, she runs away with it.The second woman, Astrid, is Jewish and comes from a circus family. She is married to German officer who turns her out to save his career. Although her family circus is no longer together and, for all she knows, has been arrested or killed by the Nazis, another circus shelters her and takes her on as an aerialist, a trapeze artist. Noa stumbles onto the circus as she runs from the police, and she, too, is taken in by the kind circus owner, both she and her stolen baby given shelter. The two women with such completely different backgrounds start a relationship that begins in hostility but blossoms over time into a wonderful friendship.I will not give away much more of the story here except to say that Astrid trains Noa to become an aerialist and both travel by rail with the circus into Nazi occupied France. As we learn from the author in her afterward remarks, the kernel of the novel begins from her reading two stories, one about a boxcar full of babies, “ripped from their families and headed for a concentration camp, too young to know their own names,” the Unknown Children. And the second about a German circus that sheltered Jews during the war. The author obviously researched extensively about circuses in general and about The Circus Althoff in particular. The reader is treated to long descriptions of how the circus travels from town to town, set up from scratch at each location. We readers are also given hair-raising descriptions of how the aerialists perform protected only by their skill and very inadequate nets. While it is obvious that author Jenoff mainly wants to tell the story of how Jews were sheltered by German circuses, she develops her characters carefully and fully so the story, itself, is fascinating quite aside from its political and moral messages.I am told by reader friends that there is a large circus community in Portland, and I find myself driven to learn more about the history of circuses and aerialists. This is love story of the very best sort; it is heartwarming and frightening in equal measures. Although a fairly long novel, I predict that most readers will read it in a sitting or two. Once started it is hard to put down.

The Orphan’s Tale by Pam Jenoff 

Anna Ellory

There are three narrative voice in this novel: Lotte, a young girl with Downs syndrome; her older brother Rune, whom she calls Roo; and the ghostly voice of their mother that comes to them only in words written long before.To give a rapid sketch of the novel without giving away too much, it moves back and forth between Then, January 1989, and Now, 1999. And from West Germany to East Germany both before and after the fall of the wall.Mama has tried to escape with her children many times, running from her abusive husband. But he is a powerful person in the West German police, and he uses his influence each time to drag her back home. Finally, in desperation, she flees to East Germany to find an old friend who runs a home for battered women, and she takes with her documents of her husband’s that she will use as bartering tools with the East German communist leaders to find safe passage for her and her children.Rune and Lotte are incredibly close, and Roo vows to care for her always. He, being older, remembers much of the abuse that his mother (and eventually he as well) has suffered from Papa. Lotte, only five when they make their escape, loves her Papa, and believes him to be her protector. When a strange package appears in the mail with a notebook and many pages of drawings, Papa, in a rage, tears it all into tiny pieces and tells Lotte that it is all lies from her whore mother. Lotte manages to gather together all the pieces and tries to make sense of these words from Mama whom she has been told is dead. When she reads of a group of women who are trying to reconstruct documents shredded in haste by  the East German secret police as it became obvious that the wall would fall, she decides she has to find these puzzle women to help her reconstruct Mama’s words meant for a her and Rune. Saying, as her brother and her mother have always told her that she is more than her Downs and that she is inde-pen-dent, she sets off on her own to go to Nuremberg  and the Puzzle Women.Turns out Lotte is incredibly good at putting together the fragments of her mother’s pages, and several of the women take her under their wing and help her with the task. Sweet, kind Lotte is loved by most who meet her and look at more than her medical condition. Slowly, the mother’s voice emerges in wonderfully poetic strings of words meant for her loved children. The more or less stream of consciousness words of Mama are often hard for this reader to follow and make sense of, but there is a wonderful, poetic beauty to her words.‘Mama, Roo says…’ Lotte started, hair across her face and her cheeks pink from sleep; disheveled, more a baby when awoke from sleep than any other time. She’s growing up so fast. The innocence of her wrapped around me and swelled in the room like a sunrise: expansive, hopeful. Her pajama bottoms scrunched up on one side, hair in a tangle. Moo Bunny under her arm, the cold morning light at her back, but standing in front of me was the warmth of my child fresh from sleep.A light within light. Awoke from bliss, to the world … and into a world that has changed.Rune is a wonderful artist who begins his artistic career as a graffiti-ist , but who has great talent in portraiture and other forms of art. Hoping in 1999 to escape from his abusive father and take Lotte with him, he applies to an art institute that would provide housing as well as a stipend. Alas, his father manipulates behind the  scenes and makes sure that his application for admission is rejected, in spite of the fact that the teachers are very impressed with his portfolio. While this is primarily a novel about spousal abuse, there is much about the two Germanys both before and after the fall of the wall. Mama and her children do find refuge in the East, and the novel is quite fair regarding the good things about East Germany. But Rune is drafted into the Pioneers, and made to inform on his neighbors and even on the remarkable woman who runs the shelter. The poor boy carries with him tons of guilt over not having been able to save his mother, his inability  to keep Lotte safe, and finally for the consequences of his informing on others. While this novel is difficult to read, both emotionally and because of its form, I think it is a wonderful novel, and recommend it to all serious readers. I don’t think it lends itself to piecemeal reading. 

<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-xbZhnkmbOEI/YKgMD2O2LII/AAAAAAAAFh0/0kxvXUL8wWo8ndYzfuoR4KK38W00PUEkACLcBGAsYHQ/s500/Puzzle%2BWomen.jpg" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a>There are three narrative voice in this novel: Lotte, a young girl with Downs syndrome; her older brother Rune, whom she calls Roo; and the ghostly voice of their mother that comes to them only in words written long before.To give a rapid sketch of the novel without giving away too much, it moves back and forth between Then, January 1989, and Now, 1999. And from West Germany to East Germany both before and after the fall of the wall.Mama has tried to escape with her children many times, running from her abusive husband. But he is a powerful person in the West German police, and he uses his influence each time to drag her back home. Finally, in desperation, she flees to East Germany to find an old friend who runs a home for battered women, and she takes with her documents of her husband’s that she will use as bartering tools with the East German communist leaders to find safe passage for her and her children.Rune and Lotte are incredibly close, and Roo vows to care for her always. He, being older, remembers much of the abuse that his mother (and eventually he as well) has suffered from Papa. Lotte, only five when they make their escape, loves her Papa, and believes him to be her protector. When a strange package appears in the mail with a notebook and many pages of drawings, Papa, in a rage, tears it all into tiny pieces and tells Lotte that it is all lies from her whore mother. Lotte manages to gather together all the pieces and tries to make sense of these words from Mama whom she has been told is dead. When she reads of a group of women who are trying to reconstruct documents shredded in haste by  the East German secret police as it became obvious that the wall would fall, she decides she has to find these puzzle women to help her reconstruct Mama’s words meant for a her and Rune. Saying, as her brother and her mother have always told her that she is more than her Downs and that she is inde-pen-dent, she sets off on her own to go to Nuremberg  and the Puzzle Women.Turns out Lotte is incredibly good at putting together the fragments of her mother’s pages, and several of the women take her under their wing and help her with the task. Sweet, kind Lotte is loved by most who meet her and look at more than her medical condition. Slowly, the mother’s voice emerges in wonderfully poetic strings of words meant for her loved children. The more or less stream of consciousness words of Mama are often hard for this reader to follow and make sense of, but there is a wonderful, poetic beauty to her words.<blockquote>‘Mama, Roo says…’ Lotte started, hair across her face and her cheeks pink from sleep; disheveled, more a baby when awoke from sleep than any other time. She’s growing up so fast. The innocence of her wrapped around me and swelled in the room like a sunrise: expansive, hopeful. Her pajama bottoms scrunched up on one side, hair in a tangle. Moo Bunny under her arm, the cold morning light at her back, but standing in front of me was the warmth of my child fresh from sleep.A light within light. Awoke from bliss, to the world … and into a world that has changed.</blockquote>Rune is a wonderful artist who begins his artistic career as a graffiti-ist , but who has great talent in portraiture and other forms of art. Hoping in 1999 to escape from his abusive father and take Lotte with him, he applies to an art institute that would provide housing as well as a stipend. Alas, his father manipulates behind the  scenes and makes sure that his application for admission is rejected, in spite of the fact that the teachers are very impressed with his portfolio. While this is primarily a novel about spousal abuse, there is much about the two Germanys both before and after the fall of the wall. Mama and her children do find refuge in the East, and the novel is quite fair regarding the good things about East Germany. But Rune is drafted into the Pioneers, and made to inform on his neighbors and even on the remarkable woman who runs the shelter. The poor boy carries with him tons of guilt over not having been able to save his mother, his inability  to keep Lotte safe, and finally for the consequences of his informing on others. While this novel is difficult to read, both emotionally and because of its form, I think it is a wonderful novel, and recommend it to all serious readers. I don’t think it lends itself to piecemeal reading.

The Puzzle Women by Anna Ellory

Emma Donoghue

The influenza pandemic of 1918 killed more people than the First World War—an estimated 3 to 6 percent of the human race.This quote from the author’s note about her novel The Pull of the Stars set the scene for this gripping and beautiful  book. Many of you will know about Emma Donoghue because of her novel, Room, which was made into a movie. I was very impressed with that novel, but honestly have found other of her novels even more impressive. Donoghue is a writer of immense talent and a huge heart. There are three main characters in this novel: a young nurse, Julia Powers, who works in a severely understaffed hospital in Dublin, where for three days she finds herself in charge of a unit for pregnant women who have come down with the dreaded flu, and thus have to be isolated from the other pregnant women. Bridie Sweeny, who is an even younger volunteer helper, and who finds herself quite suddenly in the middle of a rather chaotic scene with no training, but a deep need to be of service. And, finally, a rarity for the times, a woman Dr. Kathleen Lynn who is rumored to be a Sinn Fein rebel on the run from the police.Nurse Powers can serve in the ward because she has already had the flu and is therefore immune.  The novel begins with her on her way to work, part way by bike and then by tram.Children carrying suitcases were filing into the train station as we swung past, being sent down the country in hopes they’d be safe. But from what I could gather, the plague was general all over Ireland. The spectre had a dozen names: the great flu, khaki flu, blue flu, black flu, the grippe, or the grip…(That word always made me think of a heavy hand landing on one’s shoulder  and gripping it hard). The malady, some called it euphemistically. Or the war sickness, on the assumption that it must somehow be a side effect of four years of slaughter, a poison brewed in the trenches or spread by all this hurly-burly and milling about across the globe. The chapters of the book are related to the course of the disease, Red, Brown, Blue, Black.Well, I said, it starts with a light red you might mistake for a healthy flush. If the patient gets worse, her cheeks go rather mahogany. (I thought of the turning of the leaves in autumn.) In a more severe case, the brown might be followed by lavender in the lips. Cheeks and ears and even fingertips can become quite blue as the patient’s starved of air….Bridie Sweeny asked, Is blue as far as it goes?I shook my head. I’ve seen it darken to violet, purple, until they’re quite black in the face.Most of the book is taken up with the particular stories of the three or four pregnant women who are isolated together in the small makeshift ward. While the nurses deal immediately with the pain and suffering of the patients, they have very little power, unable to administer  pain medications without the direct order of a physician, and not even allowed to use the medical equipment at hand. Dr. Lyon is a rare exception in that she tells Nurse Powers that she can use her own judgment in administering aspirin  and even opiates.Although this is not a political novel, the asides on  the Sinn Feiners are perceptive and clearly show Donoghue’s  sympathies.  Dr. Kathleen Lynn’s character is based on a real life doctor, described by one of the the cynical orderlies as  “a vicar’s daughter from Mayo gone astray—a socialist, suffragette, anarchist firebrand.” In spite of the severe shortage of doctors in the hospital, during one of the times of greatest need and chaos, she is summarily arrested and taken in chains from the hospital.I learned a lot about maternity from this superbly crafted work and a lot about the sexism in the medical profession which, while somewhat improved  these days, is still very much with us..Nurse Powers notes the ridiculous methods of prevention and alleged cures by the ignorant, not so unlike certain idiot’s responses to today’s covid. One young patient finds it hard to believe she has contracted the flu since she has been so careful. “Gargling with cider vinegar and drinking it to.”Some placed their trust in treacle to ward off the flu, others in rhubarb, as if there had to be one household substance that could save us all. I’d even met fools who credited their safety to the wearing of red. Next we’ll be hearing of drinking bleach as a cure. The compassion and wisdom of Emma Donoghue shines forth in this novel, and while much of it is sad, there are also many moments of joy and bravery.  One of the pregnant women had been living in a Catholic home for unwed mothers, and Bridie also has been raised in a Catholic orphanage. Nurse Powers learns that a woman who is cared for in one of these homes is expected to stay and work for a year after the birth of her child as payback for being allowed to be in the home during her pregnancy. I puzzled it through. So for the crime of falling pregnant, Honor White was lodging in a charitable institution where tending her baby and those of other women was the punishment; she owed the nuns a full year of her life to repay what they were spending for imprisoning her for that year. It had a bizarre, circular logic. And at the end of that year, the women were not allowed to take their babies with them when they left. Emma Donoghue is a giant among writers. I have read three other of her novels since reading The Pull of the Stars; each is utterly different from the other except for the power of her prose and the acuity of her mind. This is a novel you really need to read.

<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-TjxlAn6JZ3o/X6XIeUbNRGI/AAAAAAAAFfo/fC3HEBfxGFoZWHIjLR0Y_ECP10a4SZ59wCLcBGAsYHQ/s500/Pull%2Bof%2Bthe%2BStars.jpg" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a>The influenza pandemic of 1918 killed more people than the First World War—an estimated 3 to 6 percent of the human race.This quote from the author’s note about her novel The Pull of the Stars set the scene for this gripping and beautiful  book. Many of you will know about Emma Donoghue because of her novel, Room, which was made into a movie. I was very impressed with that novel, but honestly have found other of her novels even more impressive. Donoghue is a writer of immense talent and a huge heart. There are three main characters in this novel: a young nurse, Julia Powers, who works in a severely understaffed hospital in Dublin, where for three days she finds herself in charge of a unit for pregnant women who have come down with the dreaded flu, and thus have to be isolated from the other pregnant women. Bridie Sweeny, who is an even younger volunteer helper, and who finds herself quite suddenly in the middle of a rather chaotic scene with no training, but a deep need to be of service. And, finally, a rarity for the times, a woman Dr. Kathleen Lynn who is rumored to be a Sinn Fein rebel on the run from the police.Nurse Powers can serve in the ward because she has already had the flu and is therefore immune.  The novel begins with her on her way to work, part way by bike and then by tram.<blockquote>Children carrying suitcases were filing into the train station as we swung past, being sent down the country in hopes they’d be safe. But from what I could gather, the plague was general all over Ireland. The spectre had a dozen names: the great flu, khaki flu, blue flu, black flu, the grippe, or the grip…(That word always made me think of a heavy hand landing on one’s shoulder  and gripping it hard). The malady, some called it euphemistically. Or the war sickness, on the assumption that it must somehow be a side effect of four years of slaughter, a poison brewed in the trenches or spread by all this hurly-burly and milling about across the globe. </blockquote>The chapters of the book are related to the course of the disease, Red, Brown, Blue, Black.<blockquote>Well, I said, it starts with a light red you might mistake for a healthy flush. If the patient gets worse, her cheeks go rather mahogany. (I thought of the turning of the leaves in autumn.) In a more severe case, the brown might be followed by lavender in the lips. Cheeks and ears and even fingertips can become quite blue as the patient’s starved of air….Bridie Sweeny asked, Is blue as far as it goes?I shook my head. I’ve seen it darken to violet, purple, until they’re quite black in the face.</blockquote>Most of the book is taken up with the particular stories of the three or four pregnant women who are isolated together in the small makeshift ward. While the nurses deal immediately with the pain and suffering of the patients, they have very little power, unable to administer  pain medications without the direct order of a physician, and not even allowed to use the medical equipment at hand. Dr. Lyon is a rare exception in that she tells Nurse Powers that she can use her own judgment in administering aspirin  and even opiates.Although this is not a political novel, the asides on  the Sinn Feiners are perceptive and clearly show Donoghue’s  sympathies.  Dr. Kathleen Lynn’s character is based on a real life doctor, described by one of the the cynical orderlies as  “a vicar’s daughter from Mayo gone astray—a socialist, suffragette, anarchist firebrand.” In spite of the severe shortage of doctors in the hospital, during one of the times of greatest need and chaos, she is summarily arrested and taken in chains from the hospital.I learned a lot about maternity from this superbly crafted work and a lot about the sexism in the medical profession which, while somewhat improved  these days, is still very much with us..Nurse Powers notes the ridiculous methods of prevention and alleged cures by the ignorant, not so unlike certain idiot’s responses to today’s covid. One young patient finds it hard to believe she has contracted the flu since she has been so careful. “Gargling with cider vinegar and drinking it to.”<blockquote>Some placed their trust in treacle to ward off the flu, others in rhubarb, as if there had to be one household substance that could save us all. I’d even met fools who credited their safety to the wearing of red. </blockquote>Next we’ll be hearing of drinking bleach as a cure. The compassion and wisdom of Emma Donoghue shines forth in this novel, and while much of it is sad, there are also many moments of joy and bravery.  One of the pregnant women had been living in a Catholic home for unwed mothers, and Bridie also has been raised in a Catholic orphanage. Nurse Powers learns that a woman who is cared for in one of these homes is expected to stay and work for a year after the birth of her child as payback for being allowed to be in the home during her pregnancy. <blockquote>I puzzled it through. So for the crime of falling pregnant, Honor White was lodging in a charitable institution where tending her baby and those of other women was the punishment; she owed the nuns a full year of her life to repay what they were spending for imprisoning her for that year. It had a bizarre, circular logic. </blockquote>And at the end of that year, the women were not allowed to take their babies with them when they left. Emma Donoghue is a giant among writers. I have read three other of her novels since reading The Pull of the Stars; each is utterly different from the other except for the power of her prose and the acuity of her mind. This is a novel you really need to read.

The Pull of the Stars by Emma Donoghue 

Well worth the investment of time, attention and thought.

Always interesting, usually provocative.

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