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!



Atonement

I finished this book a few months back, and it has taken me this long to finish a blog post about it. Its not that I didn't like this book - it was very well written, and the story sucked me in. Maybe because the end was so jarring - I sat back and reflected about the novel for a long time trying to piece the whole together. Maybe it is because it had come so highly recommended to me - and I really thought I would like this more. But having just finished watching the movie, I find my thoughts distilled enough to proceed.

Many people seem familiar with the plot: Briony is the youngest child in a affluent home. Out of boredom, powerlessness, naivete, and motives I'm not sure even Briony understood, she accuses a family friend of a horrible crime - and then suffers with the guilt of her knowledge for the rest of her life. Briony's choice to change the end of her story for her readers begs many interesting questions - what is the intrinsic value of honesty? How much guilt can and should a person suffer or self-apply in the aftermath of such an event? How much responsibility can be taken for the outcome of a series of events that one may have set in motion, but did not further contribute to?

Needless to say, the writing is exquisite. The story is vivid - especially in parts 2 and 3. describing the war scenes and the hospital. But the characters, while interesting, were not as compelling as I had hoped or maybe needed. Each of the main figures serves as a person and as a sort of allegory or type, which distanced my emotions from them in the book. Also, they were mostly annoying aristocratic types, which I did not connect well with. This was not so in the movie, which (unusually) was better in connecting my emotions to the rawness and tragedy of the plot in a way I was not able to in the book.

The film's ability to connect me to the story did not come without certain sacrifices. In the movie, many of the fascinating ambiguities are necessarily lost, and the story is reduced in its complexity. But perhaps that is precisely my problem with the book: the nuances and complexity were a bit too much to also permit a deep emotional connection.

Instead of feeling the book was deeply meaningful, when I finished this book and put it down I was immediately over it. But watching the film has reminded me of the fantastic aspects of the book, and I find myself more than willing to keep and open mind and give it a re-read another time.

Astonishing Splashes of Colour

This is the story of Kitty, a woman with a peculiar family history who has suffered a personal tragedy resulting in the loss of her unborn child - and the loss of her ability to have children.  This experience has knocked Kitty a little off her rocker, and we follow her through a series of interactions that cause her to unravel further.

I really wanted to like this novel because of its title.  As the first few pages indicate, "Astonishing splashes of colour" is a quote from Peter Pan, which evokes an image of an adult who failed to achieve maturity, and prefers to live in a land of childhood.  In many ways, this is Kitty - so much of her identity is wrapped up in the fantasies she has created about the mother who was absent from her childhood, and about her older brothers, and even about her unique marriage partner.  And of course, her mental images of these people cannot stand up to the truth as it is revealed to her throughout the story, and this created much of the driving force of the plot.

But ultimately, while I appreciated moments of this novel,  it fell short for me.  I can't say I actually enjoyed it.  I think in order to appreciate the novel you have to like, or at least understand and sympathize with Kitty.  But I found her frustrating, foreign, and unsympathetic for most of the story.  Her choices are sometimes so poor that I could only cringe and watch the fallout from a distance - and that's not how I feel about the characters I engage with.

An interesting nominee, but not really my taste.

Oryx and Crake

I had the fortune, or misfortune perhaps, to read this book during last week's major snow and ice storm in the Pacific Northwest.  Ice collected on our trees and brought down massive branches onto the electrical lines (to dramatic cracks and snaps!) across the region.  We lost power Thursday morning and didn't get it back until Monday night - nearly 5 full days of dark and cold. It was an ideal setting to read this novel about a horrifying dystopia set not too far into the future.

Jimmy/Snowman is perhaps the only human left alive on Earth, following a massive plague of dubious origin.  He co-exists with various animals and people (?) who have survived as the result of genetic engineering - the rakunks, pigoons, and wolvogs, as well as the Children of Crake, a humanoid race created by Jimmy's childhood friend.  Perhaps what is so frightening about the world described by Atwood via Jimmy's flashbacks is that is seems so possible - large self-contained communities owned and run by massive corporations, human obsessions with aesthetic perfection and agelessness, and even (and mot horrifying to me) the ChickieNob chickens that have been modified to grow 12 legs and no heads.  Atwood criticises several social institutions and trends by taking them to their extreme but logical extension, with compelling results.

Atwood doesn't wrap nearly everything up, and I am still uncertain about the nature of the love between Jimmy and Oryx/Oryx and Crake, and she leaves the end unresolved and big questions completely up to the reader's determination.  Sometimes I find this way of completing a novel lazy, but in this case it was perfect.  And as usual, part of the brilliance of this novel was Atwood's facility with words - creating them, twisting their meanings, and substituting them for each other.

Of course, it could be that I was in a post-apocalyptic mood, but I thought this was a fantastic novel - FAR superior to Vernon God Little which won this year.

Bitter Fruit

Set in post-apartheid South Africa, the Ali family's broken relationships are on display in this miserable little novel.  The Bitter Fruit of the title is Silas Ali's warm beer of escape, white Kate and Julian's newborn democracy in which they are no longer wanted, and, most especially, Lydia Ali's son Mikey, born after her rape over 19 years ago.

Achmat Dangor's expression of all of this bitterness is in the various troubled sexual activities, encounters and desires of his cast of characters.  They include the violence of rape, the apathy of unwanted marital sex, inappropriate seduction between age groups, infidelity, homosexuality (female and male), and incestuous urges and actions of all kinds: father/daughter, mother/son and nephew/aunt.  After a while, these sexual encounters lost their shock value - and did not appear to have any other important value.  This theme seemed like a badly-contrived plot device in lieu of an actual story or compelling characters, and I was over it long before it was over.

Other themes that I might have found interesting emerged late in the story, including the amorphous definition of race and the plurality of religion possible within a single family in modern South Africa.  Perhaps because I was not a native reader, I had a hard time figuring out each characters racial identity - and I couldn't determine whether this was because of my ignorance in picking up on cues particular to the country, or whether it was intentional on behalf of Achmat Dangor.  Religions seemed a bit more obvious, and the way each character is liberated and  also confined by his or her religious upbringing was teased out nicely. However, it wasn't enough in the end to encourage me to care about the characters at the climax of the action, or to care about the unresolved pieces.

The Collected Stories of Reynolds Price

This enormous collection of short stories contains 50 stories written over a span of almost 40 years.  Because the collection is so lengthy, diverse, and spans the two ends of Price's writing career, it is nearly impossible to summarize them in just a few sentences.  I found a few of the stories to be very compelling, several to be quite good, and about half of them I felt little to no engagement with, and because these were the majority of the stories, I have quite mixed views about this collection as a whole.

Price's stories appear to be at least partially autobiographical, and touch on a few recurring themes.  Many of the stories are about the coming-of-age of a 12-year-old boy - his first experiences in responsibility, sexual awakening, and understanding what it is to be a man (see, for example, "The Enormous Door").  Other stories are about the friendships and other relationships that develop between adult men ("A Final Account").  Several of the stories contain supernatural elements with ghosts, angels, and other spectres advancing the story.  And many stories are about the loss of a partner, infidelity for sure, as in "Serious Need," or another I enjoyed, "Truth and Lies," about a woman who confronts her husband's mistress and learns something unexpected.  But there are also a few about the suicide of a wife and its impact on the living husband - with a focus on the male perspective that I found frustrating (see, for example, "Good and Bad Dreams" and "Walking Lessons").

For me, the most authentic stories were about the relationship between black and white characters in Price's native North Carolina in the immediate post-civil war generations.  Probably my favorite story in the collection was "The Anniversary," which, unusually for Price, was narrated by a woman.  On the anniversary of the death of Pretty Billy, her fiance who tragically died the day before their wedding, Miss Lillian Belle, an old maid, narrates the story of their courtship, wedding planning, and his death to a young black boy, a neighbor.  Her memories are poignant and compelling, and leave room to imagine a greater scandal that Miss Lillian Belle either intentionally omits or is actually innocent of - and the mystery rounds the story out perfectly.

A second favorite was "Uncle Grant,"  about the long friendship between the Price family and an elderly black man.  Uncle Grant's character was vivid and complex, and the tensions between the white middle class Prices and the former slave really resonated with me (also read "Bess Waters" for a similarly compelling story).  I suspect it is this kind of writing, and the American Southern voice, that flagged this collection to the Pulitzer committee.

Mother's Milk

Edward St. Aubyn's quirky, scathing little novel touches on a resonant subject, which made for a surprisingly delightful and balanced read.  The tale is narrated by three members of the Melrose family who are as a whole intellectual, self-centered and empty people.  The narration bounces between characters with ease; from precocious 5-year old Robert who opens the book narrating the circumstances of his birth first hand in a bitter voice, to Patrick, the father of the family narrating his dissatisfaction with life resulting in substance abuse and infidelity, to Mary, the mother, and her preoccupation with mothering and spoiling her second son, to the detriment of all other relationships.  They are a witty, sarcastic bunch who offer negative yet entertaining commentary on several subjects, including the wealthy and upper class, adherents of new age theories, and Americans (in general).

Alone, this style would become tiresome and unsustainable.  But the book also offers commentary on the various ways in which families repeat the mistakes of their elders, or, in trying to avoid certain mistakes, swing the pendulum too far to the opposite.  Patrick is obsessed with his elderly mother's decision to leave her vacation home in the south of France to a New Age institution run by an Irish "shaman."  Mary is wounded by her mother's disinterest and uninvolvement in her childhood. Who knows what little Robert and Thomas will be attempting to recover from in the wake of their parents' choices.  The power of parenting - and especially mothering - is explored in a wide variety of contexts.

This imperfect novel contains some absolutely delightful gems of description:

"His attention, which usually bounced from one thing to another was still...His mind was glazed over, like a pond drowsily repeating the pattern of the sky."

"They made their way back toward the stone table, trying not to smile too much or look too solemn. Patrick felt himself sliding back under the microscope of his family's attention"

"She went on decanting the poison of her resentment into him for the next two hours."

But the novel ends abruptly, and the witty and sarcastic voices do become a bit tiresome before it does. 

Jamrach's Menagerie

This book should have been right up my alley.  Something about sailing ships and survival stories have always interested me - and this one had both!  Perhaps it is the distilling of the entire world into a small ship, a few people, to evoke the best and worst of human nature that I am interested in.  I also really enjoy ship-story symbolism ala the Rime of the Ancient Mariner.  Maybe that is why I feel slightly let down by Carol Birch's beautifully written story. 

Jaffy is an 1850's London street urchin with no prospects, who, as a young boy, survives an encounter with a tiger and enters the world of Jamrach's menagerie of exotic animals.  Jaffy befriends another young assistant, Tim, and together, a few years later, they set sail aboard a whaling ship bound for Indonesia in pursuit of what I understood to be a Komodo Dragon to add to the menagerie.  But the ship falls under a mysterious curse, and the sailors must endure horrible, awful hardships (and that's about all I can say about that without ruining the most gripping part of the book).

Even though in many ways the story echoed off one of my favorite Booker winners the Life of Pi, my complaint with the book is not plot-related.   It is that none of the characters, including and especially Jaffy, seemed well developed.  I had a hard time understanding what motivated most of their actions, the basis for their friendships, and their inner lives.  With more character development, the story could have been a coming-of-age story about Jaffy, an analysis of the various ways in which we are all caged and free, or (and I think I would be most interested in this) a bromance about the relationship between Jaffy and Tim.  But because the characters were always distant and misty, it fell short of these. And perhaps because it was unclear what the message or purpose of the plot was, the opportunity for the rich and deep foreshadowing and symbolism that I hoped for never materialized.  Upon reflection, I think the dragon was just a dragon, which disappoints me.

But all was not lost.  While Carol Birch seems to lack in character development she excels in scene-setting.  Her locales are punctuated with bright colors, pungent smells, and rich detail.  I agree with others that the London she describes is compelling, as are the Azores, the ship, and the sea during a storm.  Even though I ultimately wanted more character, the atmosphere and gripping story resulted in a pretty good read.

A Long Long Way

It is fitting that my copy of Sebastian Barry's A Long Long Way contains quoted praise from J.M. Coetzee, whose novel Disgrace had me impressed and appalled: appreciative of the mastery and cringing from the subject in a way similar to my reaction to this novel.  A Long Long Way resonates with me - days after putting it down I can't get his images out of my head.  Unfortunately, those images are scenes of gruesome death in the trenches during World War I (not exactly my favorite).  But while I won't be wanting to revisit the topic for a while, I have to admit this was a masterful book, and I'm disappointed that it lost out to John Banville's snooze The Sea for the 2005 Booker. 

Barry begins with a sympathetic and complex character, Willie Dunne, who takes the reader on a journey through the emotional landscape of war: terror, pain, loss and horror, yes, but also camaraderie, nationalism, familial love, and hope.  But Barry's true gift is in describing the horrors of the war with gorgeous and almost poetic language.  I especially admire his descriptions of the first chlorine gas attack ("it was the force of something they did not know that drove them shoving and gasping away from that long, long monster with yellow skin"); the awful thick mud encountered in the trenches, and the shattering cold of a winter on the front lines.  These moments of description overcame my general aversion to war novels to the point where I can picture myself re-reading this book.

Willie Dunne also experiences the worst of the war: the piss and shit and blood and guts and tears and panic of the Irish soldiers in Belgium and at home.  My Irish history is a little rusty, so I needed to read up on the the uprising of 1916.  But a detailed knowledge was not necessary to understand the emotion and tragedy of their situation.  Barry successfully made me feel emotional about an unexpected subject, and painted a vivid portrait that took me somewhat reluctantly into the scenes.  It was deeply moving, and perhaps even scarring.

Animal's People

Animal’s People is a beautiful, heartbreaking and wonderful story about one of the modern era’s most terrible tragedies.  I knew very little about the Bhopal/Union Carbine Disaster that took place in India in 1984 until i looked it up mid-read.  And although this novel is set in the fictional Indian city of Khafpur, a very similar thing has happened in at about the exact same time to this community.

Animal is born days before the disaster strikes.  One night, there is a problem with the chemical plant in town (owned by the Kampani).  Poisonous gas is released into the streets, immediately killing thousands of residents, including Animal’s parents and family.  The effects linger, tormenting and killing thousands more with respiratory and nerve damage, and these effects continue on for years.  Animal, our narrator, is struck with crippling disfigurement in his childhood, which the doctors attribute to the disaster, including the American doctoress Elli, who has set up a clinic to help those sickened by the disaster. 

The novel’s backdrop is the ongoing court case.  The Amrikan Kampani has eluded legal consequences in the nearly 20 years since the disaster struck.  Apparently by bribing Indian authorities, it has paid no damages, had no assets seized, and has not been tried.  The Kampani has not even cleaned the contaminated groundwater at the site of the old chemical plant, or told authorities what exactly was in the poisonous gas – claiming “trade secrets.”  As with every great book these events are only a part of the story, but this backdrop particularly resonated with me.  This novel should be read by all those politicians who have recently been claiming we should abolish or seriously downsize the EPA to enable corporations more freedom.

Animal is another great reason to read this novel.  He narrates the book in a series of tape recordings, to be later transcribed and translated into English – a crazy vibrant jumble of Hindi/Urdu/French/English at that.  Although he is vulgar, sex obsessed, and selfish, he is also a deeply caring, long-suffering, and hopeful supporter of his desperate community.  And while occasionally Indra Sinha was a bit heavy handed on the “finding the humanity in the Animal” theme, I was ultimately brought to tears by Animal’s story.

The Clothes on Their Backs

I absolutely loved this book, in large part because I was able to identify with the main character and see echoes of my family's history in the characters. I felt that I understood their emotional responses and motives for their actions.  However, even though I really connected with the story, I can see why it didn't ultimately win the Booker (being beat out by The White Tiger)

Vivien is the only child of Ervin and Berta Kovaks, Hungarian Jews who moved to London in the late 1930s as the extreme persecution was beginning.  Once in London, Ervin chooses to keep his head down and assimilate - never going out, never making friends, never traveling - and as a result, Vivien grows up with almost no understanding of the country her parents came from, their religion, culture, language, or history.  This set up resonated with me as a great-granddaughter of Eastern European immigrants to America, in a family that until very recently did not even know their former religion, language, or even the name of the village they came from.  Perhaps my great-grandparents' attitudes were similar to Ervin Kovaks'.

But Vivien has an uncle Sandor, who came to London years after her parents did, and lived through the horrors of the labor camps during World War Two.  Sandor and Ervin do not get along, and are in many ways opposite takes on life as an immigrant - one fading into a half-life to avoid detection and the other flamboyantly living life, and disregarding authority.  Following a personal tragedy, Vivien defies her father and forges a relationship with her uncle, and in the process learns about her family history and her father's past.  Throughout Vivien's story is a theme of the power of clothes:  the transforming power of a new dress, the memories a pair of shoes can elicit, the class status associated with various types of clothes.  And although this theme is pervasive throughout the novel, it never becomes overbearing or trite.

And as much as I connected with the story, I agree that it doesn't have the depth and fantastic language that the White Tiger had, and I'm sure not everyone connected with it as I did.  So I'll concede this one to the Booker committee.

Parrot & Olivier in America

I'm not sure why I thought I would like this book more than I did.  I have to admit that I'm not a huge fan of the early 1800's Europe as a moment in history, but the look at America as a burgeoning democracy was enticing.  However, the stylized language, as accurate as it may have been, was wearisome and cumbersome.  It was longer than it needed to be.  Character revelations came too late - I already didn't care about them or their motives or histories.  Themes of incarceration, class in democracy, and the male friendship between the two title characters were not well developed.  I was just bored.

The book follows Olivier, the snobbish son of French nobles in post-Revolutionary France, and Parrot, his reluctant English servant, who was originally trained as an engraver.  Olivier is forced to escape to America to avoid a revival of the revolutionary feeling in Paris with Parrot, along with his French mistress and her elderly mother, under the guise of completing a book about the American prison system.  Blah blah blah he has several encounters in the new world, a brush with the law and a failed romance.  Parrot discovers a new life and artistic ability in America and is happy.  Olivier is not. 

Sure, there were some good moments - Peter Carey is clearly an expert even if I didn't care for this novel.  I loved the insect metaphors he peppered throughout: people resembling wasps, silkworms, crickets and butterflies.  I particularly liked his description of a French wine encountered in America:

I bemoaned the palates of the Philadelphians who had called his Medoc cold and sour.  Miraculously, it was free of sediment, and rushed into my glass at that perfect stage of life.  In a year it would be a dowager with a faded old corsage, but as it entered my mouth it was vigorous and manly, completely composed, its orchestra all present and correct.  Oh heavens, that such small things make a man so happy.

Although this glass of wine sounds excellent, the rest of the novel just wasn't for me.

The Quickening Maze

The Quickening Maze is set in the English countryside, in an asylum for the troubled and insane in the mid 1800's.  The romantic decay of the mind, contrasted with wildness of nature, in which famous poets of the era are characters - sign me up!  Even the title is suggestive, poetic, romantic, and half-mad.  But if you like all of these things you may be disappointed in this book.

The story follows the Allen family, owners of the asylum, upon the arrival of Mr. Alfred Tennyson, the poet, and his older brother who takes up residence in the asylum.  The story does not have much of a strong central plot, though there is certainly a traceable arc.  The story is variously narrated by Mr. Allen, his 17 year old daughter Hannah, John Clare, an older poet and resident of the asylum, and a woman named Margaret who has been at the asylum for some time.  The two male characters and the two female characters are easily comparable in their actual and potential life experiences, though I'm not sure to what end.

It just never lived up to the potential.  The characters were not as interesting as they should have been.  The Mr. Allen and his family felt like caricatures and never really came alive on the page.  Alfred Tennyson was a bit boring, and not nearly as poetic as I had hoped.  The crazy characters, John Clare and Margaret were the most interesting:  Margaret with her delusions related to Christianity and her abuse at the hands of her husband, John Clare with his disillusionment with the modern world and his experiences with the Gypsies.  But they were not interesting enough to make this a book I would recommend to anyone.  It wasn't terrible - just disappointing.

Room

I know this review is coming quickly on the heels of my most recent review.  That's because I read this entire book in one day.  Cover to cover.  Couldn't put it down.  This book is nothing if not gripping, fascinating, and constantly keeping your wanting to read just a little bit more.

I can't tell you much about the plot of Room by Emma Donoghue, or I will ruin it for you, and you're going to read it, aren't you?  The blurb on the back should suffice: 

To five-year-old Jack, Room is the world.  It's where he was born, its where he and his Ma eat and sleep and play and learn.  At night, Ma shuts him safely in the wardrobe, where Jack is meant to be asleep when Old Nick visits. 

Room is home to Jack, but to Ma its the prison where she has been held for seven years.  Through her fierce love for her son, she has created a life for him in this eleven-by-eleven-foot space.  But Jack's curiosity is building alongside Ma's own desperation--and she knows that Room cannot contain either much longer.

There.  That doesn't give much away, but it sets the stage for me to comment on a few themes that really interested me as I was reading.  First, everyone mentions it, but that's because it is essential to what makes this such a compelling book:  Five-year-old Jack as the sole narrator is unique and wonderful.  She manges to persuasively bring me into the mind and thoughts of an (albeit precocious) child, and leaves enough clues for the mature reader to gain extraordinary depth from the happenings that Jack only sort of picks up on. 

Second, as told second hand through Jack, the relationship between Ma and Jack has to be constantly managed by Ma in the context of their confinement and total domination by Old Nick.  As Jack gets older, Ma struggles to ensure that Jack sees her as the dominant figure in his life, as the provider and caretaker when Old Nick is acknowledged as the "bringer" and can make Jack's world light up simply by leaving a candy treat.  I was so empathetic with her struggle here.

Finally, Jack's perception of the world through television, his inability to believe that the things he sees on TV exist, and his capitalization of the nouns for things in Room (because they are the only example of such an item he has ever seen) brought me back to my first year of college and the Platonic Forms. Donoghue's implication here is that Jack's experience in Room is similar to the Unenlightened Man Plato describes, who sees the pure Idea - and that any other experiences will be echoes and reflections of the pure Idea or true form.  As you can imagine, this has some heavy implications for Jack.

Shortlists - Starting With 2010

This weekend, I went to Helena Montana for the wedding of a very dear friend.  I had just started The White Tiger, and decided against bringing another book.  Big mistake.  I had much more travel time than anticipated, and The White Tiger ended up being a much faster read than anticipated (post to come).  So, even before hopping on my return flight (and light-rail ride) I needed a new book, and I needed it fast.

Luckily, my friend and travel companion had also run out of her reading material.  We made a quick trip to Hastings before heading to the airport.  But Hastings didn't exactly stock the entire list of Man Booker Prize winners, and I was having trouble finding a good one to purchase.  And this is why I am officially expanding this blog to cover Booker Prize winners AND shortlist nominees.  The Man Booker Prize also publishes a longlist of contenders (normally about 13 books) but I'm not sure if I have the energy to add any of those yet...

My first Shortlist novel is Room, by Emma Donoghue.  Room was Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2010 along with 5 other books, including that year's winner, The Finkler Question.  The other books that made the shortlist are:

Peter Carey Parrot and Olivier in America
Damon Galgut In a Strange Room
Andrea Levy The Long Song
Tom McCarthy C

All of these, as well as shortlisted novels for other years are now officially on my list.