Oscar and Lucinda

I think Peter Carey is going to be one of those authors I respect but don't enjoy. 

It's a harsh and vibrant world, populated by an extraordinary cast of well composed characters. Oscar's battles with hardline religion, gambling addiction and constant lack of self confidence and insight are shadowed and reflected in the passions and restrictions Lucinda imposes on herself. Carey paints two bleak and difficult people, both unsuited to the lighter aspects of life and unable to be honest with the people around them let alone themselves. They've both constructed a web around their lives, a personal facade to protect them from an often harsh reality. At times you just want to give them a slap but their intentions are (mostly) just even if nothing seems to go right. (not me)

 

"Sydney Harbor had a silver skin.  A cormorant broke the surface, like an improbably idea tearing the membrane between dreams and life."

There are some great characters in here and the scenery and world recreated is vivid, sharp and dangerous. It's quite an achievement and I can understand why this won the Booker (and why it was nominated for the best of Booker). Ultimately though I can't give it more than 3 stars as by the Goodreads rating system I didn't often like it. It's a slow and worthwhile read but liking it is something else entirely. I do applaud the ending though.
 (not me)
"The fact that the object of their bet was now made to appear at once so vain and mediocre, and that it was, in any case, impossible to build, conpired to act as a catalyst in Lucinda's soul, to make a focus for all the vague unease she harbored about the bet, and fearful thoughts which she had hitherto managed to keep submerged, now bubbled up like marsh gas and burst, malodorous, in the very forefront of her conscious mind."

Alias Grace

"he is a gentleman, or next door to it.  I don't think he is English, and so it is hard to tell."

"servants, who are born knowing their places; he has not yet reaccustomed himseld to the resentful demonstrations of equality so frequently practiced on this side of the ocean.  Except in the South of course; but he does not go there."

"And one person was as good at the next, and on this side of the ocean folks rose in the world by hard work, not by who their grandfather was, and that was the way it should be."

In a Strange Room

I will see you again, Reiner says and raises a hand, then he is disappearing slowly into the distance, the solid landscape turning liquid as it pours.

"There is a moment when any real journey begins.  Sometimes it happens as you leave your house, sometimes its a long way from home."

Lost Memory of Skin

PEN/Faulkner shortlist

Really interested in how he made me feel sumpathy for such dislikable characters

"Where do you think you are, Kid, the goddam Garden of Eden? Snakes aren't evil any more than they're good.  They're just following their nature.  Which as long as we don't screw them up by putting them in cages and zoos is snake-nature.  Good and evil, Kid, that's strictly for us humans."

"He wonders if the Writer's harsh theory about knowledge -- that you can't ever know the truth about anything -- is true after all.  Maybe it is.  Maybe it isn't.  But the Kid can't even know that: he's stuck between believing the Writer's theory and not believing it."

We Others: New & Selected Stories

The Slap

"What it imparts is precisely the knowledge of greater power withheld.  In that knowledge lies the genuis of the slap, the deep humiliation it imposes.  It invites the victim to accept a punishment that might have been worse -- that will in fact be worse if the slap isnt accepted.  The slap reuired in the victim an unwavering submission, an utter abegnation. The victim bends in spirit before a lord.  In this sense the slap is internal.  The sting passes, athe redness fades, but the wound lingers, invisible.  Therein lies the deepest meaning of the slap: its real work takes place secretly, out of sight, on the inside."

The White Glove

"But if the glove was creating a new Emily, a hidden Emily, it was also doing something to me.  The peace I'd always felt in her presence was being replaced by wariness, by an almost phychological alertness, as if my body were warning me to watch her closely."

He engages the senses with this thick creamy nostalgia.  I feel that i experienced my own childhood in these makebelieve places, full of lemonade and cherry pie and sunshine.

"Oh, i knew where I was going, didn't want to know where I was going, in the warm blue air with little flutters of coolness in it, little bursts of grass-smell and leaf-smell, lilac and fresh tar."

And then he takes some simple, ordinary thing, and infuses it with great weight, with supernatural power, in some way derived from the nostalgia itself.  It is the justaposition of the ordinary and the extraordinary that permeates all of these stories.

We Need New Names

I find myself enthusiastic about this novel.  Told almost as a series of short stories (but cohesive enough to be a novel in my mind), this is the story of 11 year old Darling, a resident of a Zimbabwean slum called "Paradise."  Darling's voice is fresh, playful, and wise - and although her life intersects with many "political" topics, both in Zimbabwe and then later as an American immigrant, those issues mainly take a back seat to Darling's personal experience.

The first half of the novel follows Darling through her exploits with her preteen friends in Zimbabwe.  Darling's life intersects many big picture issues in Zimbabwe, poverty, race, revolution, AIDS, evangelical Christianity, etc., but we only hear about them as a backdrop to the games and exploits of the gang of friends.  Darling is more focused on the practicalities of her life - the intricacies of the rules of the various games invented by her friends, where she will find more guavas to eat to stave off hunger, interactions with her family members and neighbors, and her daydreams of one day joining her Aunt in America.

One thing I loved about this book is the loved the rich vivid metaphor that laces NoViolet Bulawayo's storytelling:

Then MotherLove stands beside this giant poster of Jesus and starts singing.  At first there is this hush, as if people don't know what music is for, but then they start swaying.  Soon they are gyrating and twisting and writhing and shuffling and rocking.  MotherLove's head is tilted up like she's drinking the stuffy air, her eyes closed.  Her mouth is open just a little, you'd think she didn't even want to sing, but her voice is boiling out of her and steaming up the place.

I also appreciated the message of the story, especially as we follow Darling to America.  Darling has much to say about the ranks of "illegals," working in America and the heartbreaking reality of being without a country to call home.  I'm not surprised this one didn't ultimately win the Booker this year, but I'm very grateful to have read it.

The Testament of Mary

The term "novella" may be too big for this short story.  I think that was my first disappointment.  And the length of the piece is not mandated by the subject.  The story felt at times truncated and rushed,  at other times over packed and too dense.  Colm Toibin has an interesting starting point here, but I'm not a fan of how he delivered.

The Testament of Mary, we are supposed to understand, is the first hand account of Mary, mother of Jesus Christ. (In case you were confused, and I'd argue that you would have an excuse to be, the Library of Congress has helpfully applied the Subject Heading "Mary, Blessed Virgin, Saint — Fiction.")  However, nowhere is the narrator identified as Mary explicitly, and nowhere does she refer to her son by his first name.  Instead, Toibin relies on his audience's assumed familiarity with the basic story of Jesus to put the pieces together.

It's Toibin's coyness on the whole subject matter that bothers me the most.  Rather than writing a compelling story, I think he wrote around a compelling story.  His gaps are supposed to be filled in by Biblical scripture.  He relies on his audience knowing the vague references he makes to characters from the gospels (without using their names, for the most part).  However, as I am not a biblical scholar, or even a sometimes reader, I found myself lost on many of his more obscure references.  Oh, I'm familiar enough with the tales of Lazarus and the wine-into-water miracle, and the circumstances of Jesus' death, but Toibin expected me to have a greater understanding of the details - otherwise his plot twist and foreshadowing fall somewhat flat, as they did for me.

However, it was clear even to me that the Mary narrating this story is not the sweet demure Mary of the illustrated Children's Bible we had growing up. This Mary is bitter, and dislikes people - particularly men:

I have made clear to her that her sons, if they ever should come here, cannot cross this threshold. I have made clear to her that I do not want their help for anything. I do not want them in this house. It takes weeks to eradicate the stench of men from these rooms so that I can breathe air again that is not fouled by them.

 Maybe Mary's dislike of men springs from the loss of her son, but it seems that Mary was a bitter woman prior to her son's murder.  Speaking of a time before his death, she states:

And so I decided to set out for Cana for the wedding of my cousin's daughter, having decided previously that I would not go. I disliked weddings. I dislike the amount of laughter and talk and the waste of food and the drink flowing over and the bride and groom more like a couple to be sacrificed, for the sake of money, or status, or inheritance, to be singled out and celebrated for something that was none of anyone's business and then to be set up with roars of jollity and drunkenness and unnecessary gatherings of people.

 Harsh words from Mary! Whatever it was in her past that has caused her to feel this way about people or marriage is simply not touched in this story.

Which gets me back to the very short length of this story.  Toibin could have developed the plot so much more.  Mary's experience of the circumstances of Jesus' conception, birth, and childhood remain a mystery.  Oblique references to minor characters could have been fleshed out more satisfactorily.  Mary's character could have undergone a palpable change into the acerbic misanthrope we hear narrating the story.  We could have find out a bit more about Joseph and her relationship with him.  Providing these details would have helped make this story more engaging and memorable for me.

It's my first of the 2013 Booker Shortlist novels, but its already not my pick for winner.