The Bone People by Keri Hulme (1984)

Keri Hulme (born 1947) is a writer from New Zealand and The Bone People is thus far her only novel; she has also written poetry and short stories. Her ancestors were native New Zealanders as well as Europeans.

In 1985 Hulme won the Booker Prize for The Bone People. This book is a mystical fable that weaves the history and language of the Maoris and the grim realities of contemporary life (alcoholism, poverty, child abuse) with the story of three individuals who become wrapped up in each other's lives.

The story begins with Kerewin Holmes, a reclusive intellectual and painter of mixed ancestry who lives in an isolated tower on the New Zealand coast. She spends her days fishing and drinking and is frustrated by her inability to paint. One day she finds a little boy, Simon, has broken into her home. She soon discovers he is mute, but very clever and has a reputation for being a thief and a trouble-maker. She keeps him at her house until his father, Joe, comes to pick him up.

Joe, a Maori, explains how he came to be blond Simon's father: Simon was found washed up on a local beach after a terrible storm and was the only survivor of the boat he was on. He was severely traumatized, and since he has never spoken, his origins were a complete mystery. Joe and his wife volunteerd to raise the boy as their own but soon thereafter, she and their infant son died, leaving Joe and Simon on their own.

Kerewin, Joe and Simon soon become friends and something of a family but at the same time, Kerewin begins to see that Simon is more than a handful for Joe, and while the father and son love each other devotedly, Joe simply cannot cope and is physically violent with Simon.

Kerewin herself (I kept thinking that she represented the author - look at the similarity of their names, profession and ancestry) has her own issues; she is estranged from her family and avoids all intimacy, and is struggling with her art.

Joe and Kerewin both try to make things work for Simon but the story takes a dramatic turn which results in severe injuries for Simon, prison for Joe and a life threatening illness for Kerewin - and they are all separated from one another, and forced to find their own way back.

This novel was a bit difficult to get into at the beginning due to author's very unique style of writing and my unfamiliarity with life in New Zealand but once I began to know and care about the three main characters, it was very difficult to put down. It was a painful book to read at times - I found it especially sad when it became clear that Joe was beating Simon, and it was so difficult to reconcile the caring father who hugged and kissed his son with the vicious drunk that violently abused him. I could understand why Kerewin tried to help them in the way she did, and also why it did not work in the end.

This book is also a fascinating introduction to New Zealand's culture and society. I would highly recommend it for "Books Around the World".

The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris (2010)

I love looking at the "new arrivals" shelf in our library - sometimes I find a brand-new book by an author I never heard of and it intrigues me and I take it home and am swept away by a new story. This book was one of those.

I admit I hadn't hear of author Joshua Ferris before. His first novel was "Then We Came to the End", which won several awards. This is his second novel and I was immediately caught up by the premise: Tim is a partner at a prestigious law firm in Manhattan, with a lovely home in the suburbs, a wife who sells real estate and an overweight teenage daughter. Inexplicably, he suffers from a never before described disease that has incredible and far-reaching consequences for his life and everyone around him, and no one can determine if it is a physical illness or a mental disorder. Namely, he suffers from bouts of uncontrollable walking.

Are you intrigued? I was. I couldn't put the book down! The storyline shifts back and forth between different periods in his life when he suffers from the walking on a regular basis as well as the periods of remission in between, and little by little we learn what the disease really entails, how he manages it and what effects it has on him, his career, his wife and daughter and his relationships with them. Sometimes the story reminded me a bit of "The Time Traveler's Wife" by Audrey Nieffinger; towards the end of the book it often made me think of "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy.

The book deals with the idea of "til death do us part" in a marriage: to what lengths should a partner go to support the other partner with a debilitating illness? Should the sick partner stop accepting help and support from the other, and set them free to live a "better" life? Or is this also a kind of betrayal? It also adresses the question of a man's identity and how it can be so wrapped up in his career that nothing seems to be left when it is taken away from him.

Finally, the utter helplessness of the medical community when faced with something so unexplainable...the biggest question that I had in my mind all through the book was why didn't they consider amputating his legs? If that sounds barbaric, read the book and tell me if that doesn't occur to you as well, especially towards the end. Or does it seem that he finally finds some kind of peace with his existence? I couldn't decide.

The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O'Farrell (2006)

On Saturday my youngest son had a badminton tournament so I wanted to have a gripping, fast read to keep me occupied during the long waits we have between matches. Out of my stack of library books, I chose this book by Maggie O'Farrell. I have read one of her books before, her debut novel "After You'd Gone" which I remembered as being gripping, un-put-downable, and with a twist at the end. So I thought this might be just the right kind of book!

Indeed it was! The story hooked me in from the get-go. Esme Lennox, of the title of the book, is the key character. She is a 70-something woman who has been kept in a mental institution in Edinburgh for 60 years. Her great-niece, Iris Lockhart, receives word that she is Esme's only remaining relative and is suddenly responsible for Esme, whom she never even knew existed before now. The mental institution is due to close and Iris has to make arrangements for Esme's further care.

Iris discovers that Esme was Iris's grandmother's younger sister. Iris's grandmother, Kathleen, who is in a nursing home with Alzheimer's, is no help in sorting out the mystery of why Esme was put in a mental home at the age of 16 and never released, never visited, never acknowledged as being a member of the family. As she learns more and more and gets to know Esme personally, she unearths long buried family secrets that have an enormous impact on her life.

This was a well-written story that moves along and is very hard to put down! The scenes of Esme and Kathleen's early childhood in colonial India and return to Scotland are well done - we can easily imagine the culture shock it must have been to move to such a different place for the two young girls. I also loved how the book not only focused on Esme, but is in fact the story of three women's lives: Kathleen and Iris are more than just side characters, the author's development of them adds great depth to the story and helps us understand more about the family and societal dynamics that led to the great tragedy of Esme's life.

Ultimately, this is a book about identity and how it is intertwined with our family and our ancestors as well as our descendants. As Esme realizes after she meets Iris:

We are all...just vessels through which identities pass: we are lent features, gestures, habits, and then we hand them on. Nothing is our own. We begin in the world as anagrams of our antecedents.

The Known World by Edward P. Jones (2003)

I was so glad I found this in my library. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 2004 and was also one of Oprah's ten books she chose that made the most impact on her in the past ten years (latest issue of Oprah magazine). So I knew it would be thought-provoking.

The story follows various characters in Manchester County, Virginia in the mid 1800's, a time when white landowners had black slaves. What I didn't know is that free black landowners sometimes also had slaves, and one of the main characters in the book is Henry Townsend, a black farmer with a large estate and many slaves. Henry has done well due to the good graces of the County's most powerful white landowner, William Robbins, who allowed Henry's father to first purchase his own freedom and then his wife's and finally his son's. Before he had enough money to free his son, Robbins made Henry his personal valet and taught him much of what made him able to be successful when he finally had his own estate.

We become acquainted with so many characters: white, black, Native American; free, enslaved; educated, uneducated; those with values and morals and those with no scruples. This book also gives an incredible close view of life in those times: how people ate, worked, interacted, loved and hated. We see the lack of freedom of the slaves but also the other "second-hand citizens" of those times, i.e women, Native Americans, homosexuals. The portrayal of this society is also surprisingly violent, especially the conclusion of the novel.

The story is elegantly woven and tips back and forth between many characters, different points in time, and various points of view. Sometimes it is difficult to remember which character is which - as a reader you must be attentive with this book. But it is well worth it as towards the end you have a wide view of the humanity and inhumanity in Manchester County. I do agree that it is thought-provoking, eye-opening and very well written, and I learned a lot reading it.

The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver (1999)

Let me start by saying this is one of the best books I have ever read. I read it a long time ago and picked it up at the library again recently because its subject matter has become very timely - this year Congo celebrates its 50th anniversary of becoming independant from Belgium, and the major events of the book take place during the violent period surrounding Congo's independence in 1960. At the moment there are many commemorative events planned here in Belgium to mark this anniversary and so I thought it a good time to re-read this book.

Aside from being a historical-political novel, which it certainly is, this is also an intimate portrait of a family. The family mirrors the family I grew up in, in that there are daughters. Their father, Reverend Price, a Baptist minister in Georgia, decides to take his wife Orelanna and their four girls to Congo as missionaries. He will be in charge of trying to convert the inhabitants of a small Congo village to christianity, a crusade he takes to with a fiery passion and without any regard for the local customs or diplomacy.

The four daughters are: Rachel, about to turn 16 and more concerned with her hair and clothes than anything else; Leah and Adah, 14-year-old twins who are both incredibly intelligent but still very different as Adah was born paralyzed on one side of her body and does not speak; and Ruth May, the precocious and brave baby of the family. Mother Orelanna has no idea what is in store for herself and her girls until they arrive in the village and discover how difficult it will be to survive the year. Especially when the political situation in the Congo becomes very precarious and her husband refuses to leave, despite the advice from his church. This results in the Price family becoming cut off from all outside support and left to survive on their own and with the good will of the villagers. This ends up having tragic consequences for the family.

As Leah says, "You can't just point to the one most terrible thing and wonder why it happened...Each bad thing causes something worse...you'll go crazy if you think it's all punishment for your sins. I see that plainly when I look at my parents. God doesn't need to punish us. He just grants us a long enough life to punish ourselves."

What I love about this book is that even after the disaster that ends up pulling the family apart, we still get to follow their lives and see what the long term effects of this experience had on the members of the family. This book also touches on so many themes that I care about: motherhood, marriage, the relationships between sisters, religion, respect for other cultures, living abroad, culture shock, the failure of foreign policy and politics to help African countries, and the nature of evil. At the end of the book, Leah, who once worshipped her father and believed in his goal of saving the world through christianity, must admit that "There is no justice in this world...this world has brought one vile abomination after another down on the heads of the gentle, and I'll not live to see the meek inherit anything." But at the same time she sees there is the possibility to love, live and experience grace: "What there is in this world, I think, is a tendency for human errors to level themselves like water throughout the sphere of their influence...there's the possibility of balance. Unbearable burdens that the world somehow does bear with a certain grace."

Round Rock by Michelle Huneven (1997)

I have decided to try to be more proactive about blogging my reads - I find if I procrastinate I kind of forget what was most important to me in the book. I just finished this last night and brought it downstairs with me this morning and set it by the computer so I would remember to blog about it today...

There was a more recent novel by this author recommended in a recent Oprah magazine, but our library only had this book, her first. Since I love reading first novels, I took it home.

This starts out as a very quirky novel, it follows several characters in a small town in a California citrus producing valley, and a local mansion that is used as a facility for recovering alcoholics. It took me a while to get invested in the characters. There is Red Ray, the former alcoholic who runs the facility and is everyone's friend. Lewis, a messed up PhD student who doesn't want to see that he has a drinking problem. Libby, a woman living in a trailer after her architect husband left her. Billie, her best friend and heiress to a huge citrus fortune, who lives with her father and son in her mansion and is lawsuit happy. Add to that many more colorful characters and a small town mentality of everyone knowing everyone else's business... the more I read, the more interested I became.

The story has some twists and turns in the plot, and there is both sadness and resolution in the end. It was well written and makes me want to read more from this author.

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel (2009)

This book won the 2009 Man Booker Prize and when I saw it in paperback in our local bookstore that carries English books, I was intrigued. It was nice and thick (652 pages) and caught my interest because it was a historical novel about Thomas Cromwell, who was the most powerful of Henry the 8th's courtiers. I recently read a historical novel about Katherine of Aragon, Henry's first wife, so I decided that I would read this one as well - one of these days I am going to have those historical figures straight in my head!

The novel follows Thomas Cromwell from the time he is a boy, skims over his career abroad as a mercenary, and picks up when he returns to England as the right hand man of the Archbishop of York. The book is extremely well written and gives great insight into the intrigues, politics and brutal ugliness of life at court. But it also shows the main characters as human beings, people we could imagine in our society today. Anne Bolyen, in particular, and especially Henry the 8th himself stand out. But Thomas Cromwell is our hero, and however brutal he must be to defend his King's interests, he also is the beloved patriarch of his family, a loving husband and father, taking in young men as his apprentices and raising then as members of his extended family, making sure the young girls in his care marry well, and creating a very successful law practice and a warm home base.

This is a book to read slowly and savor. It does not always read easily, some passages are dense or cryptical, but it is worth it to experience the unfolding of the story.