What I Read on Vacation

My husband and I went to Kauai for 11 days.  It was awesome- I want to go back immediately.  And in addition to rain forest hiking, beach adventures, and soaking up lots of sunshine, I read several books.  These books mostly do not meet the criteria for my blog (though I may review them later - I was on vacation after all!)
Still, I thought you might be interested to know what I read:

This was my monthly book club book - it was light beach reading but I didn't connect with the characters as much as I would have liked to.  And I found it hard to distinguish between the voices of the several narrators, which was tricky.

I have enjoyed the other Amy Tan novels I have read - and this one surpassed the others by far.  I was drawn into her narrative and her characters - and moved to tears by the end.  Perfect vacation reading!

Its a potentially great set up - but I felt that throughout the story I had no idea what motivated the main character to leave her family, and I got the sense that Anne Tyler didn't either.  Not sure I would recommend this to anyone.

The Hiding Place

I have to admit I was confused and a bit disappointed by this Booker nominee. The Hiding Place follows the life of Dolores, the sixth daughter born to a Maltese immigrant and his Welsh wife.  As her name might foreshadow, Dolores' life is not easy.  She experiences a tragic injury in her infancy resulting in disfigurement, and she suffers various forms of neglect and abuse at the hands of her overwhelmed and impoverished parents, and her older sisters.  The narration is divided into two - in one Dolores the child narrates various events of her youth, and in the other an adult Dolores returns to her home in the wake of her Mother's death, and remembers slightly different events with her remaining sisters.

In this her first novel, Trezza Azzopardi has moments of descriptive brilliance, for example in describing Dolores' disfigured hand: 

I lost the fingers.  At one month old, a baby's hand is the tiniest most perfect thing.  It makes a fist, it spreads wide, and when it burns, that soft skin is petrol, those bones are tinder, so small, so easily eaten in a flame.  But I think of it as a work of art: a closed white tulip standing in the rain; a cut of creamy marble in the shape of a Saint, a church candle with its tears flowing down the bulb of wrist.

But her narration is troublingly inconsistent - young Dolores knows details of events that occurred prior to her birth or when she was an infant, and yet adult Dolores does not appear to have conversed with her sisters or family about these events since she was a young child (if ever).  But her narrative inconsistencies are not provocative or profound, alluding to something deeper - I just found it annoying.

The cover jacket compares the novel to Angela's Ashes as a tale of poverty and hardship among an immigrant community.  I was reminded more of The Gathering, which addresses similar familial issues but in a much more emotional and stirring way - I recommend you read that one instead.

The Glass Room

Some parts of this novel are still resonating with me, like the sound of metal falling against the onyx wall of the Glass Room.  Other parts of the novel dragged - it seemed new characters were introduced simply as an excuse for creating suspense and prolonging the climax.  Still, it was an interesting read, engaging at parts - a worthy Booker nominee.

The novel features the lives and family of Liesel and Viktor Landauer, a German/Jewish couple living in Czechoslovakia after Europe's Great War, and Liesel's closest friend Hana Hanakova, a truly modern Slavic woman.  However the house in which the Glass Room of the title resides is really the main character of this novel - from its conception and design, to its construction, and then following its various occupants through World War II and post-war behind the Iron Curtain up to the 1990's.  The Glass Room stands as a symbol of openness and modernity to the Landauers: a place of light, and steel and glass and air.  It is a place of romance and dreams as well.  But to its various occupants, its symbolism seems ironic and hypocritical.  The "openness" is belied when Viktor harbors his mistress within the walls of the room, the Nazis warp the "modernity" it symbolizes by using the house to study human forms for the purpose of identifying and categorizing members of each race.  And the dreams of the future are battered down under the footsteps of the sick and injured children who go to the house under the Soviet regime to be rehabilitated.

I very much liked the themes and setting of this novel, but other parts of it did not work as well.  While I found the character of Hana to be engaging, interesting, and always surprising, other main characters, including Viktor and Liesel, were much less compelling.  Also, there was something clinical in the description of the house itself that permeated the entire novel - it was distancing and a bit off-putting.  Overall a good but not great novel.

The Remains of the Day

This is my first Kazuo Ishiguro novel. I was expecting to really enjoy it - and it surpassed my wildest expectations. In this tale of the tragedy of servitude, what Ishiguro does not write is even more powerful than what he does. His adept use of languge and deep subtelty paint a rich, beautiful, and in many ways timeless tragedy - and it was wonderful.

In Remains of the Day, Stevens, a middle aged butler at a well-to-do English country mansion is given several days off by his new employer.  He decideds to take a trip, both physically and metaphorically, as he muses about the great events of his life over the course of his travels.  At first, Stevens' musings seem mundane, trite, and perhaps even boring.  But Stevens' explanation of his dedication to his job and absolute loyalty to his master, his self-sacrifice and his definitions of what make a butler great began to appear to describe something much larger - and the ways in which I started to compare his story to the tragic figure of a samaurai warrior were fascinating to me.  The parallelism between English butlers and Japanese samaurai, or really any servant class in an honor culture, was so rich that I am still wanting to read commentary and consider all of the angles days later.

Stevens' tragedy is, ultimately, that the man for whom he sacrificed his life - his family, his friendships, his individuality, and his chance at love, seems not to have been worthy of such a sacrifice. This soft, lingering tragedy is as heartbreaking as it is beautifully written, and I would highly recommend this to everyone.

Not Where I Started From

I admit I have been reading more collections of short stories than I am accustomed, to, and its not always my favorite genre of writing to read.  That said, I don't think this is why I wasn't very impressed with Kate Wheller's collection of stories in Not Where I Started From. 

Based on her short personal bio on the back cover flap -- that she was born in Oklahoma, raised in South America, and has extensively traveled in Europe, Australia, and Asia, and that she is an ex-Buddhist nun -- I was sort of anticipating the international perspective of the stories.  For example, the opening story Improving My Average is about a young girl who has lived in numerous countries and cities in South America in her short childhood, while the last story, Ringworm, follows a young woman in a Buddhist convent in Burma.  But I felt that despite her characters' vast traveling experience, they were stunted and incomplete people, lost in the world and looking for a trite sense of connection - and I couldn't help but feel that it was Kate Wheeler and not her characters that I disliked.

I was also vaguely annoyed by the several stories that contained the plot "American goes to Asia to study Buddhism and be enlightened," which after the third time became even more cliche than you would expect.  Another pet peeve was the dearth of healthy sexual relationships - which perhaps compounded my distaste for the stories.  It seemed like none of her main characters has a positive sexual encounter, and some are truly abusive.  They were just unplesant and unenlightening to read.

I'm not giving up on short stories as a genre - but I think the standard is higher for impressing me when the author has such little time to develop interesting characters and compelling situations.



The Sisters Brothers

I am catching up on a bit of a blogging backlog that I allowed to accrue this winter during the first trimester of my pregnancy.  I read The Sisters Brothers in February, as was honestly astounded and had no idea how to respond at the time.  What a truly strange novel!

Charlie and Eli Sisters are brothers (duh) who make a living as hitmen for a powerful and wealthy man. Eli, a sensitive soul, narrates the story while Charlie supplies the commitment and ruthlessness necessary to continue in their trade.  In a fast-paced plot built on short choppy sententes, Eli takes us first through a string of mishaps that seem to target him, south through Oregon and deeper into the unpopulated wilds of Northern California.  The brothers are hunting for Hermann Kermit Warm, who has in the process of inventing a mighty tool for the Gold Rush era, alienated the Sisters brothers' employer.  The last parts of the novel devolve into something akin to magical realism, as the brothers encounter stranger and stranger circumstances along their way. 

Eli's personality, his self-doubt, his misfortunes, his love for women and compassion towards his one-eyed horse, and his ability to still perform his job in a detached and cold way were the reason to stay hooked. 

But was it "Booker material"?  I honestly do not know.  Yes, I enjoyed the read very much - the plot was quirky, the characters interesting and dynamic - but the plot was surprising and the tone was humorous!  Maybe it is because it was so funny that I have a hard time taking it seriously.  Must a Booker book be serious?  Well, no,  and I'm thinking here of How Late It Was How Late among others.  But a funny, Western, with magical elements?  I'm still not convinced.

Either way I'm glad I read it!



Come to Me

Have to admit I was not wild about this collection of short stories by Amy Bloom.  The first story, Love Is Not a Pie, about a family dealing with the death of her mother, and her unusual relationshiop with two men, did move me to tears.  But it was by far the best in a collection filled with phychologically troubled protagonists. 

Bloom's characters suffer from every physchological trouble in the book - which is understandable since she spends most of her time as a practicing phychologist.  Her characters deal with low self esteem, guilt, sexual abuse, and grief.  But rather than being compelling, I felt most of these characters were presented in a distant and almost clinical way.  Dominant themes in the stories included infidelity, which  featured prominently, and motherhood.  And the most interesting stories approached the intersection of the two.

The stories were arranged in a logical order and flowed from one to the next well.  Still, I wasn't hooked - In my opinion, Come to Me was not the best short story collection in this years nominees.