Booklog for Charlotte

The Crossing Places by Elly Griffiths

The main character in the police procedurals I have enjoyed in the past typically have certain characteristics:  a tendency to drink too much, problems being a good husband, competence (unlike his fellow policemen), and the need to lose a bit of weight.  Ruth Galloway is a forensic archaeologist specializing in bones who teaches at a university in Norfolk on the eastern coast of England and lives with her two cats next to a marshland.  She is overweight, highly competent, and divorced, but more introspective than most.

She is called on for help by a local policeman and a pleasingly complex and satisfying story develops. There are interesting characters -- her mentor in archaeology, a colleague who shares a bottle of wine as needed, a neighbor she doesn't really know, an ex-husband who turns up, and the gruff Detective Chief Inspector she helps.  And there are her born-again Christian parents.

This was very much fun to read, an excellent Christmas present from Jen and Brooke. I gather this is the first in a series that feature Ruth Galloway; I wonder if the Norfolk area near King's Lynn will turn out to have a surprising number of murders.... 

Elly Griffiths, The Crossing Places, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 297 pages (I read the Kindle edition). 

Lovesong by Alex Miller

I've been waiting impatiently for this book to arrive in the mail from an independent book seller and devoured it within 24 hours. 

Alex Miller created an irresistible world with likable characters.  We meet the Dom Pacos and his Tunisian wife Houria at the end of World War II who have a cafe for the Middle Eastern men who work at the nearby slaughter houses in the Vaugirard area of Paris. Dom dies suddenly and Houria's niece Habiha comes from her village to help Houria.  Habiha falls in love with an Australian man who happens into the cafe and the two eventually take over when Houria dies.  The changes in the area that occur over the years are recounted and the friendly faces, including Tolstoy the Borzoi dog are part of Habiha and John's lives, but they never become Parisians, unlike Houria.  

John always longs to go back to Australia and have work more suited to him than helping in the cafe. Habiha is focused on the daughter she hasn't conceived.  She reassures the daughter that all will be well, she will bring her to life. She promises John she will go to Australia after she has shown her daughter to her father in Tunisia.

 As Habiha approaches her late 30s, she becomes frantic and takes steps that have terrible consequences.  She believes she has a right to do whatever she must to have a baby and draws strength from a memory of her grandmother who she imagines would approve. Her beauty, skillful cooking, love for John, and soulful singing for the men who eat at the cafe contrast with her monstrous act.

This story is framed by that of a writer who has retired and lives with his daughter in Melbourne.  He is drawn to Habiha's bakery where everyone is infected by her calm, deliberate and friendly manner. When the writer meets John, he hears the story of their lives in Paris, told to him over the course of months.

We are meant to love all the characters, and we do.  But the truth is Habiha is monstrous.

Alex Miller, Lovesong, Allen & Unwin, 354 pages.

Testament of Mary by Colm Toibin

What a strange idea to recount Mary's take on the life and death of her son Jesus.  She tells the story as an old woman near death, wishing to tell the truth, struggling against her "minders" who want to shape the story.

In Toibin's telling she is skeptical of his ideas and wholly dismissive of those who see him as the son of God:  

"He was indeed the Son of God," he said.  And then, patiently, he began to explain to me what had happened to me at my son's conception as the other nodded and encouraged him.  I barely listened.  I had other things to do.  I know what happened.

 After her husband died, young men began to gather around her son and she says, "Something about the earnestness of those young men repelled me,...something of their awkward hunger or the sense that there was something missing in each one of them...."  Later she calls them fools, twitchers, malcontents, and stammerers.

She reveals herself as a grump in describing her reaction to weddings, as she dislikes the laughter and talk and the waste of food and drink.  She describes the bride and groom as a couple to be sacrificed for the sake of money or status or inheritance.  

When Jesus has been taken into custody, the minders appear and those gathered say a great deliverance in the world will occur.  She asked if this meant he would not be crucified; the responses were just riddles to her.  She was told she and her friend Mary must leave before Jesus dies; someone else will take him from the cross, clean him and bury him.  Much to her regret, she agrees, and runs for her life.  She tells that some days later both she and Mary dreamed simultaneously that he came back to life.  Though she maintains this was a dream, she and Mary were awakened by water rising from a well and that he was borne on that water.  Her friend Mary held him and placed him across Mary's lap.

Mary lives the remainder of her life quietly in hiding, visited regularly by minders who bring her food and explain the importance of his life and death to her and interrogate her, hoping for certain answers from her that she is unwilling to give.  They explain that he died so that mankind would be saved.  She asks

"Who has been saved?"  "Those who came before him and those who live now and those who are not yet born," he said.  "Saved from death?"  I asked.  "Saved for eternal life," he said.  "Everyone in the world will know eternal life."  "Oh, eternal life!" I replied.  "Oh, everyone in the world!"  I looked at both of them, their faces hooded and something appearing dark in their faces  "Is that what it was for?"  They caught one another's eye and for the first time I felt the enormity of their ambition and the innocence of their belief.

And later she continues, "I was there," I said.  "I fled before it was over but if you want witnesses then I am one and I can tell you now, when you say that he redeemed the world, I will say that it was not worth it.  It was not worth it."

She describes those who come to visit her this way,

They are not fools.  I admire how deliberate they are, how exact their plans, how dedicated they are, how different from the group of unshaven brutes and twitchers, men who could not look at women, who came to my house after my husband's death and sat with my son, talking nonsense through the night.  They will thrive and prevail and I will die.

While Mary is an anguished mother in this telling who wants life for her son, she tells us of a "simultaneous dream," letting us know she might have chosen to believe something else.

 Colm Toibin, Testament of Mary, Scribner, 2012, 81 pages. (I read the Kindle version.)

10 Favorite Books for 2012, but if you count them, you'll see 12

It had to be 12, so you know this was a very good year.  And I regret not including Etgar Keret's book.

Montana, 1948 by Larry Watson.  The author makes the time and place come alive with a magical intensity. The narrator, now in his 50s, tells the story of events which occurred when he was 12 involving anguishing decisions his father made that were heroic.  His father was a deliberate, conflicted hero, not an instinctive one.

The Rules of Civility by Amor Towles.  This beautifully plotted book has luscious descriptions of what you could do with money in Manhattan in the 1930s.  In fact the descriptions were were so lovely they reminded me of a very good martini with 2 big olives or perhaps a sidecar made with fresh lemon in a glass rimmed with sugar. 

My Brother Jack by George Johnston.  Here's what I loved best about this quintessential Australian book: there is the coming of age story, the complicated relationship of brothers, the revelation of a different world (Melbourne in the 1920s and 1930s), the masterful storytelling, the appreciation of beauty in the most unusual places.  Perhaps the best part for me was the author's ability to look at himself and his life critically and write about it with blazing honesty.  Or perhaps I most loved the fondness he showed as he brought to life an era in Melbourne that had ended.   

Fly Away Peter by David Malouf.  An excruciatingly beautiful account of the experience of an Australian who dies during World War I.  While I try to avoid the most painful books, this one is worth the anguish.

The Cat's Table by Michael Ondaatje.  When he was 11, Ondaatje traveled on his own from Ceylon to England by ship, just as the narrator of this book did.  Otherwise the book is fiction, according to Ondaatje.  The narrator is looking back on the adventures of this trip as an adult, the ricocheting around the ship with two other boys his age also traveling alone and meeting the interesting adults assigned to the cat's table, the least desirable table on board.

The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg. The concepts describing the basis for our actions seems pretty clear and fundamental, but the ideas in this book keep cropping up in my thoughts.  The stories of how Target changes our habits and how Paul O'Neil changed a company by addressing worker safety are powerful.

 The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard. Captain James Cook was sent to record the 1769 Transit of Venus, that rare moment when Venus is between the earth and the sun and shows up as a tiny dot on the sun.  This beautiful book gives us three key individuals and near the end of the book, tells us facts which dramatically alter the positions of each relative to the others.  

Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul by John M. Barry.  The tension between Americans' belief in freedom of religion and our fondness for the tight-knit loving community of believers can be traced to the ideas articulated by Roger Williams.  Though his Puritanism was as strong as anyone's could be, he created a colony where individuals were free to believe as they chose.  

Bringing Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel.  She has managed to remake the image of Thomas Cromwell from the evil toady for Henry VIII portrayed in film to the man trying to impose the modern state in the midst of the murderous royal families of England.  There are countless gems in her writing; I like this reference to an issue of our day when she has Cromwell muse

But chivalry's day is over.  One day soon moss will grow in the tilt yard. The days of the moneylender have arrived, and the days of the swaggering privateer; banker sits down with banker, and kings are their waiting boys.

Sword and Blossom:  a British Officer's Enduring Love for a Japanese Woman by Peter Pagnamento and Momoko Williams. It was hard to remember that these two dramatic lives actually happened.  The British officer wrote 800 letters over the course of 40 years to a Japanese woman he met when he was sent to Japan in 1904. The authors both let the letters speak and filled in the background of Japan and Britain at the time.  

Autumn Laing by Alex Miller.  A novel based on the lives of an actual literary group in Melbourne from the 1930s to the 1950s is told from the point of view of one of the central figures of the group.  Autumn is the fictional name for Sunday Reed who had a tempetuous relationship with the well-known artist Sidney Nolan.

Possession by A.S.Byatt.  This 1990 Man Booker Prize winner creates the world of two Victorian poets, their friends and loved ones, their poetry, and the dramatic story of their connection.  The secrets of their romance were uncovered for us by a disparate group of scholars with competing interests who each have a piece of the puzzle. My favorite for the year. 

Loving Frank by Nancy Horan

Mamah Borthwick Cheney left her husband and two children for Frank Lloyd Wright who had designed their house in Oak Park.  They were together from 1907 until 1914 when she and her two children (and four other men) were murdered by a crazed man who worked for them.  This fictionalized account of their time together is based on much documentation including newspaper accounts and letters she wrote which were discovered during the course of the writing of this book.

Though she is mainly known for her connection to the outsized Wright, she was a well-educated woman who had taught school and had run a library at Port Huron, Michigan before marrying Cheney.  She translated works from Swedish by Ellen Key, a feminist who began writing in the 1870s and lived until 1926.  Her own diaries were destroyed in the fire set by the madman.

Loving Frank was a challenge for Mamah for lots of reasons; she had two beloved children that she left behind, she had been friends with the first Mrs. Wright, she bore much vitriole for leaving her family and living with another woman's husband, and then there's Frank himself.  Though she surely found him a wonderful intellectual partner and he introduced her to exciting new worlds, his boundless ego must have been quite a trial.  He spent any money that came his way without regard for what he already owed.  And this was most painful in the case of workmen who depended on his pay to support their families.  He was not a dependable business partner and considered himself, the artist, above the usual considerations.  And then times were much harder as a result of the publicity about leaving his wife and living with Mamah.

This is a nicely done book about the truly amazing artist Frank Lloyd Wright through the eyes of a very appealing woman.

The Light of Amsterdam by David Park

The enthusiasm of KevinfromCanada and Reading Matters led me to The Light of Amsterdam.  The three stories we hear are about individuals from Belfast who independently go to Amsterdam for a weekend and intersect very little.

Karen is a single mother in her early 40s whose defining moment was her abandonment when she was pregnant by her boyfriend.  She devoted her life to filling her daughter's every need and when we meet them, she is working two menial jobs and has saved up enough to give her the marriage Shannon wants.  Shannon has planned a hen party (a new one on me) in Amsterdam which involves much drinking and begins with her friends and mother dressing as Indians, Native Americans, actually for the flight over.  Karen has closed herself off to all connections outside Shannon.  

Marion and her husband own a nursery to which they have devoted their lives; she is in her mid-50s now and is thrown for a loop when her attractive gregarious husband gives her the present of a gym membership.  She becomes convinced that he will take up with Anka, one of the Polish women who work for them, especially when he suggests they set her up in a flower shop.  He has arranged a weekend in Amsterdam just as her crazy ideas are driving her to take drastic measures.

Alan teaches art at a college without enthusiasm and is learning to cope with the end of his marriage which occurred when he confessed a brief affair; Susan appeared to be relieved to find a reason to end the marriage.  He has much contact with her as their teenage son Jack spirals down after the divorce.  Alan expresses the heart of this book early on in this passage:

He glanced at Jack who was waiting for some homily that wasn't coming.  The advantage was momentarily with him and knowing that in this game, intensity or passion were the illegitimate children of commitment, he tried to project a sense of casual indifference.  It wasn't easy because he knew that sooner or later love would blow it out of the water.  Love was the unavoidable spanner in the works, the thing that stopped you walking away and made your pretence of calm control a hopeless lie...."

The weekend trip for Alan and Jack, Karen and the hen party, and Marion and Paul intensifies each of their problems and is the backdrop as they confront the unavoidable.  The stories are lovingly and beautifully told and I found each of them compelling.  David Park is pleasingly introspective and The Light of Amsterdam has a nice balance between realism and a satisfying resolution.