After the Dam by Amy Hassinger (Red Hen Press, 2016)

Last year my oldest son bought me a lovely Moleskine book journal, where I've been keeping careful track of all the volumes I read.  Unfortunately, that has meant that my book blog has suffered terrible neglect, which is a shame.  Thankfully, my dear friend Joy sent me a copy of the latest novel by her writing teacher, novelist Amy Hassinger, which is a wonderful reason to sit down and write a new post for my blog; not many of the books I add to my journal feel like they merit an entire blog post, but "After the Dam" certainly does.

"After the Dam" follows young mother Rachel as she leaves home in the middle of the night with her baby to drive north to her grandmother's idyllic house on a lake in Wisconsin, in a desperate attempt to regain a feeling of normalcy in her disjointed life.  Unfortunately at the lake house she is confronted not only with unusually heavy rains and threats of the nearby dam flooding, but also with her dying grandmother, and her grandmother's caretaker, Diane, who seems to stand in the way of everything Rachel wants, including perhaps rekindling an old relationship.

Like a previous novel by Amy Hassinger that I wrote about here, there are myriad themes in this book that mean a lot to me on a personal level.  One of the things that struck me immediately was the very large role that breastfeeding plays in the novel.  In the very first chapter we learn that breastfeeding makes the main character, Rachel, feel "magical, like Wonder Woman".  "She was absurdly proud of this achievement - of feeding her child - prouder than she was of almost any other accomplishment in her life thus far."  Having experienced just this feeling myself, when I read these lines I felt that physical zing of recognition that sometimes occurs when a novel really rings true.  And breastfeeding continues to play a major role in the book.  No matter how much the reader might question Rachel's judgement at certain points in the story and despite her own doubts about whether or not she is a good mother, whether or not she is making the right choices with regards to her baby (sometimes obviously not), breastfeeding is the one unequivocal thing that Rachel gets right all the time, and is rightfully proud of.

Being a mother is another major theme in this novel that hits home for me.  Not only do we have Rachel as a young inexperienced mother, trying to reconcile her desire to fully devote herself to her child and her feeling that she is failing miserably at the societal expectation to combine it with a meaningful career, there is Diane, an older, seasoned mother, whose main focus in life is protecting her grown son, Rachel's ex-boyfriend Joe, from what she sees as their destructive relationship, and doing everything she can to keep Rachel away from Joe.  What I loved about what Hassinger did with Diane is that she did not demonize her.  Diane is diametrically opposed to everything that Rachel is seeking in the novel; it would have been easy to make her a villain.  Instead, Hassinger makes Diane a character of flesh and blood and real feelings, and I found myself sympathizing with her a lot of the time.  Diane, too, is a character who is pulled in different directions.  Loyalty to her employer, Rachel's grandmother Maddy, loyalty to her son, loyalty to her desire to live her own independent live in her own cozy home.  Diane also struggles to fit the puzzle pieces of her life together, as Rachel does, as so many women do.   But Diane's age and experience allow her to see her life from a perspective that Rachel does not yet have:

That was the way of it, she thought.  You spent your youth and most of your adult years climbing that upward rise, feeling the powerful momentum beneath you, carrying you up and up, believing that things will continue in just this way, despite any evidence to the contrary.  And then one day, the momentum changed. You found that you were on the far side of the crest, and you were falling now, falling quickly, and everything you'd learned about how to live, how to be in the world, what to strive for - all of this was changed.  You could feel the undercurrent pulling you downward, gravity asserting itself, claiming you, and you knew, moment to moment, that the rise had crested and you hadn't even known it.  And that now you were headed toward shore, where you would thin into nothing, until all that would be left of you was a sheen of moisture on the face of the lake stones. (p. 240)

And just so you don't get the wrong idea from the above meditation on life and ageing..."After the Dam" is not a woo-woo spiritual book!  It has a strong ecological message and a didactic mission: Hassinger has really done her homework about dams and their environmental impact, and shares this skillfully and organically throughout the book via the lives and careers of the characters.  Finally, the book is also a well plotted thriller; as I got to the end of it I could not put it down for fear of what was going to happen.  In my Moleskine journal I gave this book five stars; I highly recommend it and will be choosing it as the selection for my book club when it's my turn to pick the book again.

The Sunrise by Victoria Hislop (2014)

This was a pick by a member of my book club.  I hadn't heard of the author, so a new discovery for me.    The story takes place in 1974 in Cyprus.

Aphroditi and her husband, Savvas, are the proud owners of the most luxurious hotel in the resort town of Famagusta, The Sunrise.   All of their time and money is invested in making the hotel profitable and successful, which puts a heavy burden on their marriage.   Savvas' right hand man, Markos, is essential to the business, and yet Savvas takes him for granted, just as he does his wife.  This leads to the inevitable and somewhat predictable affair between the two.

What is not predictable, however, but historically accurate, is the unstable political situation that leads to an armed conflict and the flight of 40,000 people out of the city.  I always knew that Cyprus was divided into two parts, Greek and Turkish, but never really knew the details; this book was an opportunity to discover the sad history behind this recent conflict.

What is unique about the book is that the story stays behind in Famagusta after most everyone has fled, following two families, one Greek and one Turkish, who initially hide and stay behind in their homes, and then move into The Sunrise, keeping out of sight of the occupying Turkish soldiers and somehow managing to survive for a time.  They also have to manage their initial distrust of each other, coming from opposite sides of the cultural divide.  They soon find they have much more in common than they they thought.  Their experiences are fascinating and frightening, the characters are given more depth than in the beginning of the book, and this is by far the best part of the novel.

Eventually the situation becomes too precarious for the families and they have to find a way to get out.  The novel follows the cast of characters through 2014, which is a nice treat, as I often finish a book wishing I knew what happened to the characters during the rest of their lives.  Getting through the more predictable beginning of the book was worth it for the second half, but I don't think I would have chosen to read this if it hadn't been for book club.  Nevertheless I am glad I did.

Beyond Borders: Stories of Yunnanese Chinese Migrants of Burma by Wen-Chin Chang (2014)

Last year my friend Wen-Chin Chang published this book based on the anthropological research she has been doing on Chinese migrants in Burma and Thailand for the past 20 years.  Published by Cornell University Press, this is most certainly an academic book; however, it is not a dry theoretical text.  As the title promises, it is a collection of individual stories of real people's lives that she has collected over the years and within the context of her research.

While Wen-Chin does frame her stories within anthropological theory, she allows her subjects to speak for themselves, and their stories unfold almost naturally as she records and interprets them for us.  We meet KMT soldiers, mule caravanners, jade traders, merchants, students, laborers, and learn about the intricate family and ethnic ties that bind them all together despite their movements from one country to another.

These are stories from a world that is unfamiliar and fascinating, and sometimes poignant.  A question that often arises is where is home?  For these people moving between countries, cultures, identities and roles, it often seems that they do not have a home base.  It is also enlightening to understand how an anthropologist works, and how she experiences some of the situations she gets into on a professional and personal level.

For me the highlight of the book was the chapter about Ae Maew, a young woman who attempts to get out of Burma and better her life through education in Taiwan.  The difficulties and frictions she faces, as well as the author's personal involvement are what made this chapter stand out.  The final paragraphs are very moving and it feels like one is reading a novel, not an anthropology text.  This particular narrative was so vivid that it was easy to imagine Ae Maew's story translating to social-realistic fiction or even cinema.  What an accomplishment to weave this kind of artistry into an academic book!  Perhaps Wen-Chin will one day write a novel based on her careful observations of this part of Asia, its people, and their compelling stories.  Until then, this publication enables us to discover what she has learned thus far.

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin (1969)

I was inspired to read this novel when I heard BBC Radio 4 was going to be broadcasting a radio drama adaptation of it this spring, so I figured it must be a good book, even though I had never heard of it.  I quickly checked to see if my library had a copy, and they did.

This book is part of the "Hainish cycle" written by Le Guin, a series of loosely connected science fiction novels that can be read alone, and which detail a distant future in which humans from various planets attempt to set up an interstellar confederacy.

In "The Left Hand of Darkness", we follow an envoy sent by this confederacy to the planet Gethen (or Winter, a planet where it is bitterly cold and snows most of the year) whose mission is to peacefully convince the leaders of the planet to join the confederacy, for purposes of trade and communication.  At the beginning of the novel, the envoy, Genly Ai, has been on Gethen for some time, and has had time to become acquainted with the way of life in one of the planet's countries, Karhide.  He has struck up an uneasy alliance with the King's prime minister, Estraven, and is hoping for an audience with the King.  Unexpectedly, the prime minister is sacked and exiled, and Genly is refused by the king, leaving him feeling betrayed and angry with Estraven.

Estraven flees Karhide to neighboring and rival country Orgoreyn, where he can hide, while Genly leaves the capital of Karhide and goes further afield to see more of the outlying areas of the country and learn more about the Foretellers, a group of people who can intuit the future.  From there he decides he will try his luck in convincing the leaders of Orgoreyn to join the interstellar confederacy, since he has not been successful in Karhide.  In Orgoreyn he is received enthusiastically by the leaders but behind his back he is sabotaged, and when he does not heed the subtle warnings given to him by Estraven, he finds himself arrested and sent to a brutal labor camp.

Slowly perishing from the harsh conditions in the camp, Genly is rescued just in time by Estraven, who decides they must undertake an 800 mile trek across a glacier to get Genly back over the border into Karhide. Estraven believes there is a chance, given the political situation, that the king can now be persuaded to join the confederacy.  During this long, dangerous and frigid trek, Genly and Estraven form a deep bond of friendship, despite their previous misunderstandings and inability to accept their differences, including their different modes of communication and sexuality.

One of the major threads of the book is the Gethenians' androgynous sexuality and how this impacts society and relationships between individuals.  Genly, as an outsider looking in, finds it fascinating but very confusing, and until he has a better grasp of it, it effects his relationship with Estraven and others.  Another major theme is the idea of culture shock and how one navigates being placed into a completely alien culture; and how one's perspective towards one's home culture changes drastically but at the same time without awareness - not until, that is, one is confronted with that home culture once again.  This is something I can definitely relate to.

This was a fascinating book, not only because of the highly original characters, Le Guin's dignified vintage prose, but also in the way the chapters alternated between Genly's dispatches to his superiors, Estraven's diary entries, and old Gethenian folk tales and legends, which enables the reader to really form a full and vivid picture of Le Guin's imagined world.  Excellent read!

The Swimmer by Roma Tearne (2010)

A random library find by an author I had never heard of before.  Roma Tearne is originally from Sri Lanka, but fled the country when she was a child and now lives in the UK.  She has published five novels, and "The Swimmer", her fourth, was shortlisted for the Orange Prize.

The originality of this novel took me by surprise.  The story starts with Ria, a middle-aged single poet who lives a secluded life in an old house she inherited from her uncle.  One night she sees someone swimming in the river at the bottom of her garden, and she begins to suspect that the swimmer is also sneaking into her house, stealing food.  She discovers that he is a young illegal refugee from Sri Lanka, Ben, and they strike up a tentative friendship that soon progresses into an unlikely romance.

A tragic turn in the story shifts the book's focus from Ria to another character, Anula, Ben's mother, who must come to England, and is confronted with being in a completely foreign environment and how this deeply affects her, and her life when she finally returns to Sri Lanka.

Finally, the third part of the book is told from the perspective of Lydia, Ria's daughter, through whom we learn of more tragedy that played out in these characters' lives.  Much of this novel is dark and very heavy, especially given the author's exploration of what it means to be an illegal immigrant in the UK, what is was like to live in Sri Lanka as a Tamil,  and extremist political hatred that are secondary themes of the book.  However, the ending leaves a small opening for a bit of hope, which is gripping after all the hard times Tearne put her characters through.

The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith (1952)

I had only ever heard of Patricia Highsmith in regards to the Ripley novels and "Strangers on a Train" but had never actually read any of these books.  "Strangers on a Train" was mentioned recently in a review I read of a current bestselling thriller ("The Girl on the Train"), and intrigued, I went looking for it in our library's English book section.  Apparently, they do not have a copy of "Strangers" but I did stumble upon a copy of "The Price of Salt", which, going by the blurb on the back cover, sounded fascinating:

Patricia Highsmith’s story of sexual obsession may be one of the most important, but still largely unrecognized, novels of the twentieth century. First published in 1952 under the pseudonym Claire Morgan and touted as “the novel of a love society forbids,” the book soon became a lesbian cult classic. Yet it was always relegated to a mystery subgenre and never before given the literary recognition that it is now receiving. Based on a true story plucked from Highsmith’s own life,The Price of Salt tells the riveting story of Therese Belivet, a stage designer trapped in a department store day job, whose routine is forever shattered by the appearance of Carol Aird, a customer who comes in to buy her daughter a Christmas toy. Therese begins to stalk the alluring suburban housewife, who is trapped in a marriage as stultifying as Therese’s job. They fall in love and set out across the United States, pursued by a private investigator who eventually blackmails Carol into a choice between her daughter and her lover.

I was curious about how a novel written in 1952 would handle a topic that was such a taboo at that time, and I fully expected that the story would feel dated and somewhat awkward, given the time that has passed since it was written.  However, the only things that dated the story were the actual details that placed it in the 1950's: the use of telephones (through an operator) and telegrams, the prices of things and amounts of money spent ($20 for a speeding ticket; $1 a day for a room in a boarding house), and the attitude of some of the characters (Carol's husband and Therese's boyfriend) towards a romantic relationship between two women as something "sordid and pathological".

But the story of the relationship itself did not feel dated at all.  If you took away all the 1950's details and gave Carol and Therese cell phones, and the private investigator a webcam instead of a dictaphone, this story could easily be transposed to our times.  It is a story of a woman trying to get out of an unhappy marriage who falls in love with a younger woman who worships her.  At the beginning of the novel and through the road trip, I did not warm to either Carol or Therese as characters.  Carol was domineering and capricious, while Therese seemed much too passive.  However, there is a huge turning point in the novel, where Therese ends up spending a week or so on her own in Sioux Falls, and we see her come out of her shell, meet other people and spend time apparently thinking about her situation and her relationship with Carol.  This time alone seems to strengthen her to the extent that she is much more mature and able to make a real conscious choice once she is back in New York City at the end of the book.

So the fact that the story is over 60 years old is not a problem; in fact, I loved the period details.  I also loved the fact that Therese and Carol traveled through South Dakota, Wyoming, Utah and Colorado; places I visited on a big road trip a few years back.  I could so imagine them in a nearly empty restaurant in a lodge in a pine forest somewhere in the Black Hills.

The Storyteller by Jodi Picoult (2013)

I read this for a new book club being set up by a friend of a friend in Brussels.  The first meeting is tonight and I am looking forward to it.  The first selection was this recent novel by Jodi Picoult.

I've read many of Picoult's books and generally enjoyed them.  She is a talented writer who knows how to put together a compelling story usually involving a moral dilemma, with believable and well detailed characters, and a plot that moves along quickly.  However, after a while, the books seemed to be all a bit similar to me, and I tired of them.  Fortunately, The Storyteller is a big departure from Picoult's usual novel formula, so that in itself was interesting to me.

This book is actually five stories or viewpoints woven into one novel and at times it felt like the stories each deserved a full novel by themselves rather than being intertwined into this one book.  There was a lot of information spilled on the reader at the beginning of the novel and at times, this felt overwhelming.

The five different stories/viewpoints that are intertwined in the book are:

• Sage Singer, a young woman who is a baker, with a tragic past she is struggling to come to terms with, meets an older German man, Josef Weber, in a grief counseling group
• a fairy tale like story about Polish vampires
• Minka, Sage's grandmother, and her experiences in the ghetto and concentration camps
• Reiner, an Nazi SS officer
• Leo, the Office of Human Rights and Special Prosecutions lawyer, whose job is tracking down former Nazis and bringing them to trial

The different stories are given extra emphasis by different typesetting, which is necessary to help the reader keep everything straight.

Once you get past the initial bombardment of information in the beginning of the book, the plot gets moving and Picoult succeeds in putting together a moving story about the holocaust, as well as a thriller about the hunt for an ex Nazi, combined with a bit of moral examination of the possibility of forgiveness.  Does it sound like there was a lot to take in in this book?  There was.  In my opinion, it tried to do too many things at once, and left a lot of potentially interesting territory unexplored, not to mention many side characters that seemed neglected (Sage's sisters) or even worse, just window dressing, like the bakery assistant who spoke in haikus (why did we need to know this? This is never made clear.)  So, another best seller for Jodi Picoult, but not one of her best, which is a shame, because the subject matter deserved more.

Pacific Edge (Three Californias Trilogy, Vol. 3) by Kim Stanley Robinson (1988)

Volume 3* in the Three Californias series takes place in the year 2065 and shows us what life is like in the small town of El Modena, California, mainly through the eyes of Kevin, a young contractor
who also is making his first steps into local politics.  It also describes a sort of utopian world where people have seemingly taken the necessary actions to address environmental concerns: for example, everyone gets around by bike; while cars are only used occasionally for longer distances and then they are rented (so no one owns their own cars).  Homes are built with all kinds of environmentally sound technologies and people do not live by themselves in individual family homes; they co-habitate with a group of people so they can share cooking, chores and child care, and everyone contributes to doing work in the community, like helping to fix roads.  Exercise and team sports (softball) have become the most important way people spend their free time, and they have even developed a two-person pedal-powered airplane that can be rented for leisure.

However utopian the world of El Modena might seem, there are some things in human nature that never change.  Greed, for one.  One of the major themes of the book is the precarious water supply, which has become a major political issue in California cities and towns.  Also, because corporations have been forced to limit their size by law, there is still rampant fraud that enables them to be larger in a gray zone that is not apparent to the authorities.  One of Kevin's major battles as a new member of the town council is to fight the mayor's bid to develop a commercial zone on one of the town's last undeveloped natural hilltops.  As he investigates the issue, he finds there are ulterior motives to the mayor's plans.

Jealousy and heartache are another thing that a utopia does not seem to be able to fix.  Kevin's rivalry with the mayor is not just political; they are also fighting for the same woman, and so the narrative includes a love story as well.

Through Kevin's struggles and daily life, the author gives us a detailed picture of what he imagines life could be like in 2065; through vignettes of "the past" of one of the characters in 2012, we get glimpses of how he imagines the world got there and some of his "predictions" ring eerily true: for example, the way people are screened for HIV when entering the US and put into quarantine camps if they test positive in 2012 in the book is a spooky parallel to the Ebola screening and subsequent quarantine of numerous people coming out of Ebola-affected countries right now.  It is fascinating to read an author's projections, made in 1988, some of the shifts that he thought were going to take place in the next 30 years.

Excellent summary of the book here.

*My library only holds volumes 1 and 3 in this trilogy and volume 2 seems difficult to find on web bookstores, so I will have to be content with missing the middle of this trilogy.  Luckily it doesn't make a difference as far as being able to follow the story line is concerned; the three volumes are each three separate stories.

The Wild Shore (Book 1, Three Californias Triology) by Kim Stanley Robinson (1984)

This was a random discovery on the library shelf, and turned out to be very intriguing.  Written in 1984, this book tells the story of a community of nuclear war survivors in the year 2047 on the Pacific Coast in California.  The book is part of a trilogy, where each book imagines an alternate future for Orange County, where the author grew up.

In this first installment, we learn about the small community of San Onofre and how they have managed to survive and rebuild following a nuclear attack on the United States in the late 1980's.  Through the narrator, Henry, we slowly become aware of the situation in the outside world, and how it might affect the relatively isolated and hardworking group of people in San Onofre, and the peaceful way of life they've been able to establish.

Henry is a young man, and this novel is also the narrative of his coming-of-age, and how he grapples with responsibility and comes to terms with the consequences of his and others' actions.

I always enjoy reading imaginations of what the future might look like, and so enjoyed this novel, as the author's ideas of what life in 2047 could be were well thought out and sometimes sobering to contemplate.

Detailed Wiki page on this book here.

Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson (1980)

How did I ever miss this book? In 2003, the Guardian named Housekeeping one of the 100 greatest novels of all time, describing the book as: "Haunting, poetic story, drowned in water and light, about three generations of women." And I just bumped into it by accident while browsing in the library the other day. The cover caught my eye.




Housekeeping is the story of Ruth and her sister Lucille, who are cared for in succession by their grandmother, two elderly aunts, and then finally their eccentric Aunt Sylvie after their mother commits suicide. Once they are under Sylvie's care, Robinson dwells on how each of the three is changed by their new life together. She also examines the effect their mother's suicide and the legend of their grandfather's bizarre death had on them.


Narrated by Ruth and set in a fictional town on a lake somewhere in Idaho, the novel is poetic and haunting, and touches on many themes: motherhood, sisterhood and families and what it means when these relationships are cut off, the juxtaposition of "normal" society with people who live on the fringe of it (itinerants, hoarders, people who live isolated lives in the mountains or in anonymous city apartments), and the characters' relationships to the natural world. Ruth, Lucille and Aunt Sylvie spend much of their time outdoors, on and around the lake, in the woods, and on the mountain. The lake, where both Ruth's mother and grandfather died, can almost be considered another character in the novel, given the impact it has on the lives of everyone and the evocative way the author writes about it.


Finely written, thought provoking and suspenseful, I can certainly understand why this book ended up on a "best of" list, but not why it took me so long to discover it.

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens (1843)

I read this as part of the BerkeleyX Book Club MOOC.  Taking this online class was excellent motivation to read this classic novel, at just the right time of year.

Despite the old fashioned style and vocabulary (helpfully, the class offered explanations of archaic vocabulary for each chapter of the book), this was a quick read.  Assignments for the class and weekly quizzes, however, meant I did go back over parts of the book in finer detail than I would have if I had just been reading it for myself.

Most of you will be familiar with the plot, as I was, having seen one or more of the many film and TV adaptations that have been made of this novel over the years.  The main character, Scrooge, is visited by three ghosts in the course of a night, who show him Christmas Past, Christmas Present, and Christmas Future, in order to make him aware of how he is living his life, and what will happen if he does not change.

For me, the major theme of the book is that of redemption and how anyone can make a change, become a better person, and embody the spirit of Christmas more often than just one day per year.

An exciting new online book club!

Just a quick post to share something I think is wonderful: there is a new MOOC (Massive Online Open Class) that started on the EdX MOOC platform: a year long book club/English literature class, taught by Berkeley professor Maggie Sokolik.  There will be one classic book a month taught for the next 12 months, and you can sign up for each month individually.  The class starts out now, December 2014, with A Christmas Carol, and will continue in January with Huckleberry Finn.  Here is a short interview with Professor Sokolik with more explanation about the course on the EdX blog.

I, for one, and very excited about this - not only have I not really read a lot of the great classics of English literature (having a degree in French literature), but there isn't much opportunity here in Belgium to belong to an English speaking book club.

Here is the complete list of books the course will cover:

December: A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens

January: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain

February: Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

March: The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde

April: Dubliners, James Joyce

May: Dracula, Bram Stoker

June: The Jungle, Upton Sinclair

July: A Study in Scarlet, Arthur Conan Doyle

August: Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen

September: Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë

October: Room with a View, EM Forster

November: Call of the Wild, Jack London

I already took one MOOC through EdX this year (The Science of Happiness) and I really enjoyed the self paced learning environment, and so I am looking forward to continuing with the BerkeleyX Book Club.

Interested?  Check it out!

The White Princess by Philippa Gregory (2013) - book 5 in The Cousin's War series

I recently became very addicted to the BBC television series "The White Queen", based on the first four

books in The Cousin's War series by Philippa Gregory.  When the series ended, I wanted to know more and checked out the next book in the series, as well as a few other historical novels on the English monarchy by other authors.

While I did enjoy reading about what happened to Henry Tudor after he became King Henry VII, and his wife Elizabeth of York, and it was interesting to read all the details about life at court during those times, sometimes the book was a bit tedious.  Written from the point of view of the women in the kings' lives, Elizabeth of York (as portrayed by Gregory) just didn't seem to have the same power, cunning, or strategic insight as her mother, grandmother, or even mother-in-law.  She is always saying she does not know anything, or cannot do anything to help anyone, torn as she is between loyalty to her husband and love for her missing, mythical brother, one of the lost Princes in the Tower, a constant threat to Henry VII's reign.  I completely understand why the BBC decided to end the television series with the previous book.

Elizabeth of York was the mother of Henry VIII, and fittingly, the next book on my list is Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel.  I think this will be a much more engrossing read, as I loved the first novel in this trilogy, Wolf Hall.  Mantel is an incredible writer.

En finir avec Eddy Belleguelle - Edouard Louis (2014)

I have to admit that I don't read French novels very often anymore. Living in Flanders and being a native English speaker means new French novels aren't really on my radar, even though our public library, in addition to having an excellent collection of English novels, also has a good collection of French novels.

Recently, however, the weekly literary supplement in our newspaper had a full spread about Edouard Louis, the 22-year-old author of the bestselling French novel "En finir avec Eddy Belleguelle".  I read the article, intrigued about how Louis wrote the novel to come to terms with his harsh childhood, and when we were in France last week, I happened to see the book and bought it, and ended up reading it over the course of a couple of days, because it was impossible to put down.

This autobiographical novel tells the story of Eddy, a young boy growing up in a small village in the north of France in the late 1990's and early 2000's.  He is the middle of five children in a poor family; his father is a factory worker who ends up on disability and his mother an in-home aide to the elderly.  The major problem for Eddy is that for as long as he can remember, he has had feminine characteristics - he describes his voice as impossibly high, his arms as flapping entities, all barely under his control when he speaks.  And from the very beginning of the book, we are witness to the brutal bullying he is put through at school, at home, in the village, for being different from the norm.  Eddy's childhood is a hell, and not only because of the bullying.

Eddy's family experiences difficulties ranging from alcoholism, unemployment, poverty, abuse, violence, even an unhealthy housing situation.  It was hard to read his descriptions of the moldy, damp, cold home his family lived in, in addition to all the rest of the misery he describes.  He had no safe place to go.

The book is fueled by the author's need to shake off the ghosts of the past, and as the title says, to finish or be done with Eddy Belleguelle, his childhood persona, to escape the victim he was as a child, and to a certain degree, take revenge on those who wronged him.  The portraits he paints of his parents, grandmother, brothers and sisters, cousins, and other people are chilling in their dark verity; all the violence done to Eddy is laid out as if in a court of justice, fact after horrifying fact, quote after ugly quote.

The author alternates his clear, almost dispassionate first-person narrative with verbatim quotes of family, enemies and friends peppered strongly with the local dialect.  If it weren't for some of the most shocking abuse scenes, I think this book would be an excellent text for an advance high school French class - it is so well and clearly written that a non-native reader can find her way around the modernisms and slang quite easily.  In addition, the themes of poverty, discrimination, and bullying would lend themselves well to classroom discussions.  But as an individual reader, what stays with me most after finishing the book is a feeling of intense sadness that a child had to go through such a difficult time.  Thankfully for Louis (who apparently changed his last name after leaving home) it seems he was able to somehow turn life into art and move on to a better place.  It will certainly be interesting to see if he continues with his career as a novelist.

Homework by Margo Livesey (1990)

Another volume I randomly picked up at the library and continuing my London theme, I guess.  Although the bulk of this novel takes place in Edinburgh, a good part of the beginning of the novel is in London.

The story is a first-person account by Celia, a textbook editor, of her love life and two major romances, as well as a bit about her career, but the cornerstone of the story is her difficult relationship with the 10-year-old daughter of her second, much more serious boyfriend, Stephen.  Celia meets Stephen after she moves to Edinburgh for a new job after having a disastrously one-sided relationship with a very selfish man in London.

She soon discovers that Jenny, Stephen's daughter, is not the lovely little girl that her father makes her out to be; Jenny is not pleased about the new situation and proves to be very devious about showing her displeasure to Celia.  A lot of tension builds up between Jenny and Celia and this puts pressure on her relationship with Stephen.

I enjoyed this novel, for several reasons.  First of all, the peculiarly quaint, almost old-fashioned feel to it - reading it 25 years after publication, you really feel that you are going back to an older, more simpler time, most evident in the descriptions of daily life - for example where Celia has to pull over to a public telephone to reach Stephen (no cell phones!) - and in Celia's office - an assistant who has to type up manuscripts for her!

I also enjoyed the author's detailed description of London and Edinburgh, as well as the various side characters in the novel, who all rang true as regular people.

Finally, the tension between Celia and Jenny, and wondering what mean prank the little girl was going to spring on her new stepmother next created a feeling of suspense in the novel which made it very difficult to put down.  The only thing I found a bit disappointing was the ending - no twist and no decisive action from Celia.  But perhaps this is more in keeping with the novel's quaint realism.  Other than that, it was an engaging read.

Something to Tell You by Hanif Kureishi (2008)

This was a random find while browsing through the library's English novel shelves.  I had never really heard of the author, Hanif Kureishi, although I definitely remember when the movie "My Beautiful Laundrette" came out (for which he wrote the screenplay).

I took this book home to read because the story sounded intriguing and it took place in London, a city I love to visit.  The story follows the main character, Jamal, who is a middle aged psychoanalyst, as he goes about his current life in London, as well as in flashbacks of his life in the late 1970's, centered around a romance he had with a woman he believes he is still in love with, and the reason their relationship ended.  This involves a secret he has kept about a crime he committed, and he fears the secret will come out after they reconnect in the present (2005).

I struggled to get through this book and the only thing that kept me going were the descriptions of places and life in London and my curiosity about whether or not Jamal's secret came out and what the ramifications would be.  The characters and their milieu were often shockingly decadent, and I had a hard time sympathizing with or relating to any of them.  Much of the book draws on the lifestyles of the rich and famous in theater, film, television and music, with a focus on the underbelly of drugs, prostitution, sex clubs, and how people manipulate and exploit one another.  Not really my cup of tea, so it will be a relief to return it to where I found it, and start reading something else completely different.

When She Woke by Hillary Jordan (2011)

This book was a random library find; the dark red cover pulled me to take it off the shelf.

I had never heard of the author, nor of her first novel, Mudbound, which my library unfortunately doesn't have.

I've always been intrigued by stories that take place in a changed future world and When She Woke takes place in the near future in Texas mainly, where hinted-at wars and outbreaks of disease have changed society in many ways.  In many parts of the story I wished the author would have delved more into the details of these catalysts for change.   However, she stuck firmly to the story of the main character, Hannah, and the change that most affected her, the fact that abortion was illegal, and punishable by "chroming", a process whereby a convicted criminal is injected with a virus that causes their skin to turn a color that marks them to the outside world as a criminal.  In Hannah's case, she becomes red, and is instantly recognizable to everyone as a murderer.  The story details the illicit affair with her pastor that leads to her "crime", her incarceration and punishment, and her attempt to escape her plight.

The novel is an enjoyable quick read, and well paced, but many of the characters felt like they came right out of a script for a futuristic action-packed blockbuster; too many of them had too much of a stereotypical profile.  Plus the visual gimmick of bright red, blue and yellow humans seems to lend itself perfectly to a film interpretation, and a little bit more awkwardly to the printed page.

Big Brother by Lionel Shriver (2013)

I wasn't sure I really wanted to read this book.  It just did not sound appealing to me: a forty-something woman with a successful business, an attractive health-nut husband and two great step-children decides to put all of it on hold (and at risk) in order to hole up with her morbidly obese older brother in a rental apartment and supervise a boot-camp style liquid fast to help him lose the weight.  Ugh.  It sounded really grim.

But the other day I was at the library and there it sat, on the shelf.  Waiting for me.  So I took it home and began to read.  And yes, a lot of it is grim and depressing.  There is also a lot of what I would call social commentary about the current obesity epidemic as well as rumination by the narrator about her own body image.  Lionel Shriver is obviously a writer who is well read and very well informed and enjoys sneaking little tidbits of knowledge into her books; I particularly enjoyed two shout-outs to Belgium in the novel: she mentions not only the BMI or Quetelet index ("invented by some Belgian in the 1800's") but also the Higgs boson (for which fellow Belgian François Englert won the Nobel Physics prize this year).
But I can't really say I felt empathy for any of the characters in the book, except the step-daughter, who was the only one who seemed to genuinely love her obese uncle.  I raced through the book to find out what happened - reading it was like following a season of Biggest Loser, and the best part of the book, just like in the show, is the final weigh-in and the short lived celebration that follows.  Without wanting to spoil the plot twist at the end, I will say that I read the last paragraph of the final chapter several times.  At the end of the day, the book reveals its core question to be that of how much we are to hold ourselves responsible for other people and their problems.

As Shriver's main character, Pandora, says in that final paragraph: "It is impossible to gauge what you owe people.  Anyone of course, but especially the blood relation, for as soon as you begin to calculate the amount you're obliged to give - as soon as you begin to keep track, to parcel the benevolence out - you're done for...In preference to tackling the byzantine emotional mathematics of my exact responsibility for my brother, it was simpler to adjudge that I bore none.  But nothing in this life is free.  Having dodged paying the piper while [he] was alive, I pay now instead.  I pay every day."

I think what Pandora learned from her experience with her brother is that you're damned if you do, and you're damned if you don't, and that no matter what you might do to try to help someone, you're setting yourself up to be crucified in the end.   Which makes me think of the lines from a favorite Aimee Mann song: "Those eggshells I've been treading couldn't spare me a beheading." People want you to be involved and care about their problems, but they don't necessarily appreciate you stepping in and trying to solve them for them in the way you think might be most helpful. Which doesn't automatically imply that the ideal solution is to do nothing, either. It is a huge conundrum.

Perhaps Pandora would have done better to get some co-dependence counseling.  But then there wouldn't have been any drama for a book plot, would there?

Alice Munro wins the Nobel Prize for Literature!

How exciting that the winner of the Nobel is actually an author that I know and love!  And I just finished her latest collection of short stories, "Dear Life", very recently - it is on the pile of "to-be-blogged-about" books on my windowsill.  It was very good.  I'm not a huge short story reader, but I for Alice Munro I've always made an exception.  Here is a review I wrote a few years ago about an older collection of her stories: http://considerationofbooks.blogspot.be/2010/08/hateship-friendship-courtship-loveship.html

Life After Life by Kate Atkinson (2013)

I had never read anything by Kate Atkinson, but our newspaper's literary section recently had a glowing review of the newly released Dutch edition of this novel, and that is always a tip-off for me to a good book.  Not only a book that is good enough to get translated, but also worth a two page review in the paper - those are the books I make an effort to seek out.  And I was lucky - the local library had a brand new copy of the original English version.

The novel starts in 1930, with the main character, Ursula, walking into a Munich coffee house and assassinating Hitler.  And then we are immediately transported to February 11, 1910, the day Ursula was born.  And we revisit that day again and again, as well as other significant periods and days in Ursula's life, flipping back and forth in time, and in each successive revisit to a certain time the author changes a few minor details that end up having a huge impact on the events, changing Ursula's life in significant ways, and even changing history.  The title of the book is to be taken literally: Ursula experiences different versions of her own life, one after another.

I've never read a novel written quite like this one, and it was highly disorienting at first.  It is not at all clear how aware Ursula is of her unconventional gift of infinite "do-overs" or how much control she herself has of the process.  But once the reader catches onto Atkinson's technique, we're off for a wildly entertaining ride through England, London, and Europe from 1910 to 1967, all seen through the different possible lives Ursula might have lived as well as through the beautifully wrought extended family, friends, and lovers that people the novel, as well as various historical figures.

I felt the best parts of the book were young Ursula's lovingly described childhood in a grand English country house, and the struggle for survival during her very dark days in London during the Blitz; the time she spent in Germany seemed more contrived and less vivid than the rest of the book.  But altogether this was a great read I'd highly recommend.