Booklog for Charlotte

New Blog Location

Thanks to Jennifer and Abby, today I have a new blog platform. They worked with Nathan on the design and now that I have done some tinkering, the time has come for the transition. I am grateful to my daughters, sons-in-law, and husband for this birthday present. I enjoyed working with Nathan of Driftless Design whose advice was well-informed and good-spirited so that our exchanges were always fun. I am very happy with the way it looks and works and hope you will like it too. For starters the URL is thrilling:

Booklogforcharlotte.com

Though I won't be adding any new posts here, this site will be around until next year.

 

 

American Fire by Monica Hesse

The subtitle of this book is Love, Arson, and Life in a Vanishing Land, and what a fascinating story this is. It is set in Accomack County on the Eastern Shore of Virginia, a 70-mile long peninsula with the Chesapeake Bay on one side and the ocean on the other.  The area experienced great wealth from agriculture at the turn of the 20th century with the early building of railroads that gave farmers a means to distribute produce readily. This wealth vanished as trucks enabled farmers everywhere to compete in the lucrative northeastern city markets. Some of the land itself is vanishing:  Earl Swift's new book, Chesapeake Requiem: A Year With the Waterman of Vanishing Tangier Island, comes out August 7. I'm looking forward to that.

It is love and arson that dominate this non-fiction tale. The author tells the story of Charlie and Tonya in chapters that alternate with the story of the 67 fires that were set between November 2012 and April 2013. By the time he met Tonya, Charlie had served time for 30 felonies and had been on and sometimes off drugs multiple times. He once stole a cordless drill, an air compressor, a battery charger, and a propane torch. When asked about the theft, he explained the battery charger was for the cordless drill. Tanya was in her late 30s and worked hard on her appearance, in particular at tanning salons. They met at a local bar and fell in love.

The county has countless abandoned houses, left from the days when agriculture made residents rich. (The current employers, corporate chicken producers Perdue and Tyson, do not.) None of the fires resulted in death or injury of any person; in fact, chickens in a coop near a garage that was torched were freed to insure their safety. The story of the work of local volunteer fire departments, and the efforts by the sheriff and law enforcement and others elsewhere in the state to solve the mystery of who was setting the fires was endlessly entertaining. The rural nature of the county made it unlikely that anyone would observe the perpetrators.

While Charlie and Tonya were very happy for a time, declaring their love for each other on FaceBook, it turns out that the last 18 months of their relationship was marred by Charlie's erectile dysfunction. One night while they were out driving around, she asked him to set an abandoned house on fire. He couldn't bring himself to do it, so she did. She was so happy afterwards that he was willing to help her do this and after she set six or seven fires, he did the rest of them. Not sure what the dynamic there was. When they were eventually caught, he told the truth right away. At Tonya's trial, Charlie's demeanor made it clear that he couldn't have been the mastermind, and at the last moment, she changed to an Alford plea.

This is an amazing story with enough historical background to give it context. The author makes the characters come through in all their oddness and humanity. And for me it was especially appealing to read about the area. When our kids were young, we stayed on the island of Chincoteague and swam at the National Seashore on Assateague. It always felt like a magical place.

Monica Hesse, American Fire: Love, Arson, and Life in a Vanishing Land, Liveright, 2017, 255 pages (I listened to the audiobook). Available at the UVa and public libraries and from Amazon.

Warlight by Michael Ondaatje

It was Tony's review that sent me to this book, and thank you for that, Tony. It is set in London and begins in 1945 when Nathaniel, the narrator and his sister were teenagers and their parents left them "in the care of two men who may have been criminals." Nathaniel tells us the story, not always in a linear manner, from his vantage point as an adult. He brings the odd corner of London to the fore, in that very dim light of postwar time. This  reminded me of Patrick Modiano's book After the Circus,  another book recounted by an adult who as a teenager was left to his own devices by his parents. It too is from another era (the 1960s) and is set in a beloved city (Paris). Unlike Warlight, that one is all about the unresolved mysteries.

It was expected that Nathaniel and Rachel would go to boarding school after their mother left, but they rebelled and only went to their schools during the day. One of the caretakers was dubbed The Moth by the two and he kept to himself, but asked odd questions, including requesting a floor plan of the art gallery at Nathaniel's school. It had been explained that The Moth knew his mother from their work together during the war. A former boxer called The Pimlico Darter was the other caretaker. Other assorted characters came and went from the house to the mystification of the two teenagers.

The house felt more like a night zoo, with moles and jackdaws and shambling beasts who happened to be chess players, a gardener, a possible greyhound thief, a slow-moving opera singer. If I attempt now to recall the activities of one or two of them what emerges are surreal non-chronological moments.

Nathaniel explains, "There are times these years later, as I write all this down, when I feel as if I do so by candlelight. As if I cannot see what is taking place in the dark beyond the movement of this pencil. These feel like moments without context."

One of The Darter's criminal activities was to pick up greyhound dogs in the middle of the night from a truck and transport them in his barge along the Thames or one of its tributaries to another location. Nathaniel and sometimes Rachel would be there to comfort the hidden dogs while The Darter guided the barge.

Nathaniel worked in the kitchen of a restaurant The Moth had a connection to and he makes a friend, Agnes. She takes him at night to empty houses that her realtor brother has on the market. Once when dancing with her at a nightclub, he thought he caught sight of his mother. After a year or two of this life, he and Rachel were attacked and at that time his mother reappears. He and his mother move to the countryside in Suffolk.

As an adult Nathaniel works in a government archives office and he finds secret files that explain his mother's work during the war and afterwards. Slowly, one by one, the various characters who appeared in his youth are seen in a different light. Masterful storytelling.

Michael Ondaatje, Warlight, Knopf, 2018, 304 pages (I read the kindle version). Available from the UVa and public libraries and from Amazon.

The Road from Coorain by Jill Ker Conway

This 1989 autobiography tells the story of a truly rare person, a brilliant academic born in Australia who came to the US to study when she was 25. She was the first woman to be president of Smith College. This is the story of her childhood on the family's 32,000-acre sheep station in western New South Wales, her teenage years in Sydney, and college years at the University of Sydney. Her name came up by chance during a grocery-store chat with someone I worked with years ago. Shortly after that, I heard interviews with Terry Gross that were replayed after she died this spring.

Her parents acquired the property because her father was a veteran of the First World War; the two of them made a success of the enterprise through years of hard work, good decisions, and great privations. Jill is the third child and in the time of her childhood, their work was paying off. Then a multi-year drought combined with no access to transportation and a shortage of manpower during World War II resulted in the death of all the sheep. When she was 11, her father died, and she and her mother moved to Sydney. Though they never lived as a family again at Coorain, it became wildly successful, probably through her mother's knowledge and skill, even applied from a great distance.

As a student of history, she came to understand that the connection to Britain, the Australian vision of Britain as the homeland, was wrong-headed. Australia needed to see itself as a Southern Pacific nation and that economic ties to Britain were eroding. She began to see the ANZAC celebrations of the bravery of troops at Gallipoli differently, "Colonial troops had been sent on an ill-conceived and bungled mission by a callous British government which could afford to run the risk with troops whose parents, wives, and children were not voters at home." I was glad to see this, given my surprise at the take expressed by Alan Moorehead quoted in a book I read by Thornton McCamish.

In her early twenties she regularly drove from Sydney to Coorain, about 500 miles away. She passed through relatively lush countryside, and then through scrub that produced wheat successfully in good years, but only heartbreak in the dry years. Great Australian painting recorded the blazing sun, red dust, and broken hearts in the early years and she wondered why the fertile slopes were not celebrated. She noted defeated figures like Ned Kelly and poor farmers predominated in Australia rather than triumphant figures such as Daniel Boone or Buffalo Bill. She concluded it involved how the first settlers encountered the landscape. I would say that a bleak outlook was not unreasonable. Though American settlers had plenty of heartbreak, a much greater percentage of the land in North America supported subsistence farming from the outset. Australia as a dumping ground for city-dwelling criminals surely echoed through the generations, though the later Australians tried to suppress that memory. It seems to me the Ned Kelly story would resonate.

She and two men friends graduated at the top of their class at the University and the three of them applied for prestigious work in the foreign service in Canberra. The two men were accepted into the program while she was rejected for being "too good looking" and "too intellectually aggressive." She came to believe that to be successful she needed to leave Australia; she applied to graduate school at Harvard because many of the historians she most admired taught there.

I loved and admired this book and am looking forward to reading True North, the next in her autobiographical series.

Jill Ker Conway, The Road to Coorain, Knopf, 1989, 238 pages (I listened to the audiobook). Available at the UVa and public libraries and from Amazon.

The Hamilton Case by Michelle de Kretser

There is much to admire about this book, but at half way through, I gave it up. I want to read Michelle de Kretser's two recent novels, but this was available at the library, so I gave it a try. It is set in Sri Lanka and begins with a first person narrative by a man born in 1902. His description of himself and his family paint unpleasant portraits, told with a light, amusing touch that is particularly uncomfortable, given the characters. The next section changes to third person while the characters remain the same and the unpleasantness becomes clearer. The characters seem to be either venal, a victim of the venal characters or both.

Her descriptive phrases are outstanding. "Leaves mocked gravity, rising into the air. There they resolved themselves into a billow of jade butterflies." Another was from Sam's narrative, "This morning the sight of a grizzled face in the mirror so startled me that for a moment I feared an intruder had slipped into my room."

This is undoubtedly an excellent book. I just can't read it now.

Michelle de Kretser, <em>The Hamilton Case</em>, Little, Brown and Company, 2004, 304 pages. Available at the UVa and public libraries and from Amazon.

Pardonable Lies by Jacqueline Winspear

Another book in the Maisie Dobbs series; this is my third and again I appreciated the accompaniment as I worked on routine tasks.

This one, like Birds of a Feather is set around 1930 and though the economic hardships are referred to, the main focus is The Great War. Maisie is asked to find information about two soldiers and she goes to France for research. During that trip she visits the location of her own work as a nurse in the war and has a very strong reaction. At the end of the book Maisie and her dear friend join in the celebration of Armistice Day and that description was a surprisingly moving passage.

The author tells in an interview after the audiobook is completed about how the character came to her. She was sitting in traffic near the Warren Street Underground Station and watched a woman emerge from the station, stop to buy a newspaper, and make her way down the street. Jacqueline Winspear said the first chapter of the first book unfolded before her and after work that day, she rushed home to record it.

Jacqueline Winspear, Pardonable Lies, H. Holt, 2005, 342 pages (I listened to the audiobook). Available at the UVa and public libraries and from Amazon.

That Deadman Dance by Kim Scott

Kim Scott won his first Miles Franklin Award in 2000 and was the first indigenous writer to win that prize. I listened to his winner of the 2011 Miles Franklin as an audiobook, then bought it for my kindle. And I was amply rewarded for each way of experiencing the book.

This is the story of interactions between the Noongar people and the early arrivals of Europeans in the area of Albany, Western Australia, in this story set beginning in the 1820s. The main character is the wonderful and talented Bobby Wabalanginy, born when many were dying of the disease brought by the Europeans. Dr. Cross, when his time as doctor for the English outpost ended, became a booster for settlement in that remote location, touting the good connections with the native population. Though he had a close connection to a man named Wunyeran and understood that grants from the European governor failed to recognize the native rights to land, he too saw the indigenous population in terms of their usefulness and ability to become more like the Europeans, "civilized." From the point of view of both the Europeans and the Noongars, this book observes the shift of the power differential as the Europeans no longer needed them to survive and came to outnumber them.

But, Bobby, you fall in love with Bobby. He was loved and trusted by the Noongars and the Europeans. He was a quick learner and a wonderful performer. The Noongars were joined by some of the Europeans to see a dance:

...Bobby started playing. He did his shipboard dance:  the rise and fall. The boys caught on, bobbing like things floating in the water and the wave moving along them; and Bobby took little steps side to side, like on the deck of a ship. The men lay down, and Bobby walked across their moving bodies, like the boat in the harbor going from ship to shore. Walking on the waves, see? And then he was staggering side to side and mimed lifting a bottle to his lips: that dance the sailors do.

He improvised a dance that mimed Dr. Cross on his walks, picking flowers and feathers and turning pages of a book. Everyone laughed at his cheekiness and clever improvisations. At the time Bobby was very young and he trusted the "horizon people" for many years, but eventually that changed: 

My people and I (he winked) are not so good traders as we thought. We thought making friends was the best thing, and never knew that when we took your flour and sugar and tea and blankets that we'd lose everything of ours. We learned your words and songs and stories, and never knew you didn't want to hear ours....

The descriptive language in this book is remarkable. Here are three separate instances:

Drops of water fell in clusters from the straggly trees and prickly shrubs with a sound like tiny footsteps rushing and dancing all around them.

In the afternoon, Dr. Cross and his friends took them to a piano in one of the huts, and the music rose and fell over them like a waterfall, like a wave that kept rising and yet fell so surprisingly gentle and made them feel fresh. The pianist's hands danced across black and white, and that hand-dance made the music and did not just follow the sound.

But the river on the rocks sounded like someone laughing softly. Chuckling. As rivers and people do. The same.

And the title That Deadman Dance? This was the dance that came after the invaders arrived with their guns.

Kim Scott, That Deadman Dance, originally Picador, 2010, 400 pages (I listened to the audiobook and read the kindle version). Available from Amazon, published by Bloomsbury USA.

Birds of a Feather by Jacqueline Winspear

The second in the series of Maisie Dobbs books was at least as satisfying as the first. I was surprised how much I enjoyed revisiting the exceptional Maisie, but it was a lovely companion to kitchen work, walking, and weeding. Maisie, the former housemaid in a grand house, graduate of a Cambridge women's college, and nurse in France during The Great War, has become a private investigator. This one is set around 1930; the hard economic times are acknowledged, but the main focus once again is the aftermath of the war. 

The characters are tailored to meet the author's plot needs, still, there's sympathy and understanding for some of the less than sterling ones. Maisie is called upon to find the daughter of a wealthy businessman who escaped/disappeared from his house. When Maisie realizes that three of her finishing school chums from the early war years have died, she begins to understand why the daughter disappeared.

A couple of side matters include Maisie's realization that in her own life she has begun to shut out her beloved father. Her valued assistant Billy has developed a drug problem due to the pain from war wounds. But of course Maisie takes on these difficulties along with her main focus.

Jacqueline Winspear, Birds of a Feather, Soho Press, 2004, 360 pages (I listened to the audiobook version). Available from the UVa and public libraries and from Amazon.

Happiness by Aminatta Forna

Aminatta Forna's mother was Scottish and her father was from Sierra Leone. When she was young, her father worked in Sierra Leone as a physician. He was imprisoned and declared an Amnesty Prisoner of Conscience and later was hanged in 1975. According to Wikipedia, her memoir includes an investigation into the conspiracy surrounding his death. She has become a well-respected figure in the literary world and has written five novels, including Happiness, the most recent one.

This novel has several strands that are of interest separately. First, the wolf/coyote/urban fox strand. She begins with an engrossing story of an impressively smart and determined wolf hunter in New England in 1834. In the present time one of the main characters, Jean, is a scientific researcher who begins her work by tracking coyotes in suburban Massachusetts. She too works tirelessly, spending nights in a tent in order to stun a coyote using a dart so she can fit a tracking collar on it. She moved to London, having a grant to track urban foxes there. She spends nights prowling around and has made contact with a small army of doormen and others who help her spot the animals. Her work is denigrated when she is on a radio program about the presence of urban foxes as disease-carrying animals that attack pets and children. The most interesting point for me is that foxes live among us in the city and we don't know it. 

Attila is a giant of a man from Ghana who comes to London to give a keynote address to a conference in his field, psychiatry in service of victims of traumas, particularly wartime experiences. Soon after his arrival he is drawn into several dramas which demand his attention. First, the disappearance of his niece who is found in a hospital, but her 10-year-old son disappears onto the street. Their problems stem from being denounced to immigration authorities. Another grows from a visit he made to a college girlfriend, later a colleague who suffers from early-onset dementia. And finally, he agrees to make an evaluation of a woman diagnosed with PTSD resulting form the death of her husband. A few hours before his keynote speech he is moved to re-write it dramatically. The connection between the two characters comes when Attila uses the network that Jean has developed for fox-watching to search for the boy.  

It is the subject of the rewritten speech that seems to be the heart of the book and to come from its author's experience. It is clearly stated in a dinnertime chat with colleagues when Attila says,

There is nothing inevitable about the impact of trauma, except perhaps the way the victim is going to be treated by professionals like us, who will then ascribe every subsequent difficulty in their lives to what has happened to them in the past. We don't blame victims any longer, instead we condemn them. We treat them like damaged goods and in so doing we compound the pain of whatever wound has been inflicted and we encourage everyone around them to do the same.

Though there are many interesting strands and particular bits to the book, the overall weave sometimes seemed a bit frayed. The characters had their moments, but were disconcertingly perfect.

 Aminatta Forna, Happiness, Atlantic Monthly, 2018, 312 pages. Available at the UVa and public libraries and from Amazon.

Books to Read

Warlight by Michael Ondaatje. Tony's review.

American Fire by Monica Hess. About an arsonist on the Eastern Shore. Audiobook.

The Road to Coorain by Jill Ker Conway. Audiobook.

There There by Tommy Orange.