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!