Booklog for Charlotte

Ties by Domenico Starnone

The author is married to Anita Raja, the woman identified as writing under the pen name of Elena Ferrante (I've read and written about her Neopolitan Quartet). One of her first books, The Days of Abandonment is, according to the NYT review of this book, the story of a woman with two children whose husband leaves her for a younger woman. Ties widens that story to include the husband's point of view, as well as those of the adult children.

The first chapter is Vanda's terror and rage at being left; Aldo then takes us to the present when they are in their 70s and we learn that after four years with Lidia, Aldo returned to the family. He describes a bit of their present life:  the children have grown and left home, the two are about to leave for a week at the beach, and he has a couple of unpleasant exchanges when he is cheated of money. They have a pleasant vacation but return to terrible chaos in their apartment:  all their belongings are smashed and ruined, papers and pictures destroyed, but neither cash nor jewelry was taken. Aldo encourages Vanda to go to sleep while he begins cleaning up.

He sees the letters Vanda wrote to him when he left and relives those times. It's hard to say who is ultimately more unpleasant. Aldo who abandoned his wife and children, because the times dictated that you should not deny your passion? A man who thought he was only betraying his wife and this decision had nothing to do with his children? Or Vanda who makes it clear when he returns that he has no say in the household or questions of raising the children and that if he disagreed with her, he could get out? 

This short book succeeded in making me feel uncomfortable and not enlightened. I looked back at what I wrote about the Neopolitan Quartet and each of them, along with intense and minute considerations of what each party to a dispute thought and felt, had references and evocations of the wider world and how we live in it.

Domenico Starnone, Ties, Europa Editions, 2017, 144 pages (I read the Kindle version). Available at the UVa and public libraries and from Amazon.

Dance of the Jakaranda by Peter Kimani

The precipitating event of this novel set in Kenya, ranging from the late 1890s to the end of empire in 1960 was the building of the railroad from Mombasa to the shore of Lake Victoria. The railroad the British built with Indian and native labor was called the Lunatic Express and is the subject--and title--of one of my favorite books. References to Charles Miller's book turn up from time to time as that 4-year undertaking was such a dramatic story with an impact for so many. Peter Kimani says it well:  the seers like Kioni foretold the evil of the iron snake as "a beast whose belly would require communal feeding for an eternity, accurately presaging the years of colonialism that lay ahead."

One character we come to know well is Babu, an Indian who came to Africa to work on the railroad. Upon landing (shipwrecked, actually) in Mombasa, he has a run-in with Ian McDonald, the British former officer in charge of building the railroad. This animosity cropped up for the remainder of their long lives and affects the life of Babu's grandson Rajan. Their stories do not follow a linear pattern; an exchange occurs that remains mysterious for chapters. This sentence not far from the end of the book could have been used throughout the book: "To understand how this came about, let's turn back the hands of time once again and return to September 1901 in Nakuru...." 

Among the pleasures of this book are the descriptions:

When the lights went out one night in the club where Rajan sang, "Rajan stopped abruptly, torn between proceeding to the bathroom and groping his way to the safety of backstage. A moment or two passed before some illumination glowed in the distance. A candle beckoned in the walkway, stretching a tongue that licked the walls at every swoosh of the wind."

A momentous event occurred when the sky was darkened by a gigantic flock of flamingoes, birds unknown to the Indian workers. 

The strange creatures, with wings flapped open for balance, fluttered soundlessly in the breeze, amazingly effortlessly, without crashing into others. They glided on the lake's surface, their webbed feet slicing the thinnest film of water whose iridescence flashed like the flip of a mirror toward the sun. They dived in, coiling their necks at awkward angles to scoop algae, before repeating their aerial displays and feeding afresh....All this while the cooing and squeaking and the hissing from the pink-colored flamingos rose and fell with the harmony of a philharmonic orchestra.

Babu's wife Fatima lost use of her legs on their journey from India. She remained in Mombasa as work on the railroad proceeded inland. Years into the project, Babu's friend Ahmad returned to Mombasa to find her.

She ran a small shop that opened into Mombasa's fish market, a semicircular outlay of dwellings that brought in men, women, and children to the duka. The space couldn't have been bigger than a cupboard, so how Fatima fit in there and was still able to take in sacks of cereals and cooking oil and sugar and salt and spices and cigarettes and kerchiefs and simsim and mango and coconut and guava and toothpaste and bread and anasazi and mahamri and kaimati and what have you, seemed a great accomplishment.... Fatima's own torso appeared to grow out of those wares, her pale yellow melding with the colors and textures of her products.

The richness of the texture of the backdrop to the tale made it all the more complex. 

The Lunatic Express turned up for me most recently for me in another book set in Africa, Three Weeks in December.

Peter Kimani, Dance of the Jakaranda, Akashic Books, 2017, 320 pages (I read the Kindle version).

Mister Monkey by Francine Prose

The impetus for writing this novel was an incident that occurred when the author took her granddaughter to a way-off-Broadway children's musical. The budget was so low that the costumes were threadbare and the lighting director had trouble keeping the spotlight on the actors on stage. In the midst of what she thought would be a quiet moment, the 5-year-old asked her grandmother if she was interested in this. As it turned out, everyone heard, and Francine Prose had the presence of mind to answer loudly that yes, she was.

This reminded me of an incident I experienced in St. Martin-in-the-Fields that occurred during a movement pause at a noon concert. A child's voice rang out asking whether it was time to leave and the question brought the proceedings to a halt. Everyone laughed, including the orchestra. An embarrassing moment turned out to be a sweet one that united us all.

The story of the play and those connected as audience members, cast, author, and director is told by each in turn in their own chapter. The musical is an adaptation of a much-loved children's book written a generation earlier about a monkey orphaned by poachers. He is brought to the US and adopted by a widowed father and his children. He is accused by a wicked girlfriend of stealing money, arrested, and defended by an attorney named Portia. 

In the current musical Portia is forced to wear a rainbow colored wig and an otherwise ridiculous costume, the monkey is a gymnastic boy who discovers his adolescence as the production proceeds, and the wicked girlfriend has a day job as a nurse in an ER. Ray, the author of the children's book hates this adaptation and we hear his life story including that he uses the meager proceeds from its various productions to dine out at a very high end restaurant as compensation for the humiliation. Ray gives his comp tickets to a long-time waiter who is a theatre-lover and then we hear his story. The ripples from this event go as far as the story of a teacher whose student is the child who disrupted the play. The child shares the story at school and a fraught discussion of evolution ensues. 

One moment that illustrates the strength of this novel is told by the waiter Mario about a bit in the play that originated with Portia dropping her prop cell phone by accident. She instinctively kicked it off stage and that was adopted into the production. Mario says

Everyone wants to see their devices get what they deserve, to watch the buzzing, implacable demons kicked to the curb for the cunning and deceit with which they have made us unable to live without them and stolen our freedom and our ability to be silent and alone. The audience has seen the forces of good vanquish the fire-breathing dragon in our pockets, the micro-zombie that eats our brains. Their eyes have seen the glory of Saint George in a rainbow wig.

At the outset this novel seemed to be the story of a sorry group of individuals who are easily skewered, but eventually a wonderful bigger picture emerges and we come to feel a kinship to this odd collection of humanity.

Francine Prose, Mister Monkey, Harper, 2016, 304 pages (I listened to the audiobook).  Available at the UVa and public libraries, and from Amazon.

Case Histories by Kate Atkinson

I spotted this 2004 book by a favorite British author of mine at Jen and Brooke's house. As you might guess from the title, it is a mystery, a category that doesn't do it justice. I suspect it belonged to Brooke ("I like fiction that begins with a murder and ends with an arrest.") It does begin with three deaths, described in the first three chapters as Case History No. 1, No. 2 and No. 3 that occurred respectively in 1970, 1994, and 1979. 

Atkinson then introduces our hero, former policeman, now private detective Jackson Brodie who has some of the elements required in this character type. He is divorced, mad about it, and loves his young daughter. He tears from one dangerous encounter to the next, is bashed, and his life is threatened more than once. Otherwise, he and this book are unlike other detective novels. The connections among the three murders exist and it takes some time before the bits of the stories Atkinson tells fall into place.

But it is the family members who survive those deaths that she focuses on, and what an odd assortment of humanity they are. There are the sisters who hired Jackson to solve the mystery of their sister's childhood death decades before:  they both develop crushes on Jackson. There's the extremely overweight man still mourning the death of his 20-year-old perfect daughter ten years before. And there's Binky Rain who is convinced someone is stealing her cats. 

Her complaint, the reason she had originally engaged Jackson's services, was that someone was stealing her cats. Jackson couldn't work out whether cats really did go missing or whether she just thought they went missing. She had this thing about black cats in particular. "Someone's taking them," she said in her clipped little voice, her accent as anachronistic as everything else about her, a remnant, a leftover from another time, another place, long turned into history....

Binky Rain had never paid Jackson in the two years he had known her, but he supposed this was fair as for his part, he had never found a single missing cat in those two years. He saw his visits to her more as a social service:  no one else ever visited the poor old cow and Jackson had a tolerance for her idiosyncrasies that surprised even himself. She was an old Nazi boot but you had to admire her spirit.

Along with the idiosyncratic characters are the truly evil ones and enough unpleasantness to make me uneasy. I considered just skipping to the end, but the plot was too complicated for that to work, so I had to keep reading. 

Kate Atkinson, Case Histories, Little, Brown and Company, 2004, 310 pages. Available at the UVa and public libraries and from Amazon.

Venice by Jan Morris

This audiobook provided me with a nice long spell of pleasing listening. Jan Morris' desultory ruminations on that wonderful city were perfect for unfocused listening. As others who have written about it have said, it's not a book for undertaking a systematic study of the city, but you do learn much about Venice.

Some of the treasured moments of this book are below:

A list of the "minor monuments" and secondary wonders of the city precedes the exhortation to see the well-known sights of the city. That list includes advice to inspect the dustbin barges, tickle the cats' whiskers, sample the roast eel, count the trains on the causeway, attend an Armenian mass, and look a dozen lions in the eye.

Here's a funny review of the various nationalities of visitors to Venice in the summer:

Thus through the loose gilded mesh of the city there passes a cross section of the world's spawn and it is one of the pleasures of summer Venice to watch the sea monsters streaming by. Germans appear to predominate for they move in regiments, talk rather loud, push rather hard and seem to have no particular faces, merging heavily into a jolly sunburnt volkswagen mass. The Americans are either flamboyant to the point of repulsion in crimson silk or gently unobtrusive in drip-dry cotton, the one kind sitting studiously in a trattoria with its intelligent children and its large scale map, the other vigorously décolleté, violently made up and slightly drunk at a corner table in Harry's Bar.... The French are nearly all delightful, whether they are scholarly elderly gentlemen with multi-volume guidebooks or students of existentialist sympathies with purple eyelids and no lipstick. The Japanese are almost obliterated by their mountainous festoons of photographic equipment.... The Australians are unmistakable.  The Canadians are indistinguishable. The Russians no longer come. The Chinese have not arrived yet.

The lion statue awards, akin to the high school "most likely to succeed" type of awards are priceless: 

The most enigmatical is the floridly maned lion outside the gates of the Arsenal whose rump is carved with Nordic runes. The most confident is the new lion that stands outside the Naval School at St. Helena, forbidding entry to all without special permission from the Commandant. The most athletic looks sinuously past the Doge Foscari on the Porta de la Carta. The most threatening crouches on the facade of the Scuola di San Marco, his paws protruding, ready to leap through the surrounding marble. The most reproachful looks down from the clock tower in the piazza more in sorrow than in anger as though he has just seen you do something not altogether creditable beneath the arcade.

Venetians love their family histories, especially those of the Doges. When the family name of one of the Doges dies out, it is considered a tragedy. I love this story of the Justinian family:

During the Twelfth Century wars every male member of the family, bar one, was killed in battle or died of the plague. The single exception was a Justinian youth who had become a monk, and lived an austere life in a convent on the Lido. All Venice was distressed at the possible extinction of the Justinians and a public petition was sent to the Pope asking him to release the monk from his vows. Permission was granted, the reluctant layman was hastily married to a daughter of the day's Doge and they dutifully produced nine boys and three girls. When their job was done and the children were grown up, the father returned to his monastery and the mother founded a convent of her own on a distant island of the lagoon. As for the house of Justinian, it flourished ever after. A Justinian was almost the only Venetian to maintain the dignity of the Republic in the face of Napoleon's bullying and today there are still eleven Justinian palaces in Venice, a striking memorial to monkly self-denial.

The is my second Jan Morris book -- Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere which was also quite wonderful.

Jan Morris, Venice, originally published in 1960, 337 pages (I listened to the audiobook). Available at the UVa library and from Amazon. 

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders

I must begin by saying this is the best book I will read this year. 

The book is a mixture of historical fact and fanciful fiction. The event at its core is the death of Lincoln's son Willie at age 11 in 1862; this tragedy for the Lincolns makes it a tough read for parents of young children. The method used to convey the historical facts is unique in my experience as a reader. Those chapters are made up of short quotes, many of which are taken from contemporary accounts. One source is "Behind the Scenes or Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House" by Elizabeth Keckley. On a different note is Doris Kearns Goodwin's "Team of Rivals:  The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln." The accounts sometimes conflict with each other, illustrating what wretched observers humans can be. Willie died the night of a rare social event in the White House. In recounting the events of that evening, some recalled the beautiful moon and some declared there was no moon that night. 

Part of the accepted historical record was that in his anguish Lincoln removed his son's casket from the crypt and held him in his arms. The fictional part of the story is told by the beings who reside in the cemetery, chiefly three characters. There is Hans Vollman, a 40-something printer who died in an accident whose story makes him a very appealing character; Roger Bevins, III, a young man who killed himself because he was gay; and the kindly and upright Reverend Everly Thomas. All the cemetery residents, including young Willie are "in the Bardo," the transitional state in Tibetan Buddhism between the end of one life and the beginning of the next. The transition can be terrifying and a never-ending horror for those who die as children. This gives our three story-tellers great concern about Willie. They try to convince him to take actions to make the transition quickly and to influence Lincoln to let Willie go.

The persona and interactions of the three main characters and others in the cemetery manage to be light-hearted and sometimes funny. It's apparent from the outset that they don't accept what has happened to them as they refer to their coffins as "sick-boxes" and Hans Vollman only sees that his plans would be "indefinitely delayed." One night they recount their experience of Mr. Manders, the nightwatchman:

Who approached looking as he always looks when among us:  timorous, somewhat bemused by his own timorousness, eager to return to the guardhouse.--the reverend everly thomas

We were fond of Manders, who kept his courage up on these rounds by calling out to us congenially, assuring us that things "out there" were as they had been; i.e., eating, loving, brawling, births, binges, grudges, all still proceeded apace. Some nights he would mention his children. --roger bevins iii

After Lincoln held his son, the cemetery community was greatly affected and many never seen before "stood shyly wringing their hands in delighted incredulity. Although many "from that other place" came to visit, it was the touching that was rare. 

One part of their efforts to move Willie to a transition involved "inhabiting" Lincoln and concentrating their thoughts to convince him to take a particular action. Ultimately Willie departed and Lincoln was set free from that place. He realized his boy was gone: "His boy was nowhere; his boy was everywhere." And then in the voice of Hans Vollman the author tells us

His [Lincoln's] mind was freshly inclined toward sorrow; toward the fact that the world was full of sorrow; that everyone labored under some burden of sorrow; that all were suffering; that whatever way one took in this world, one must try to remember that all were suffering (none content; all wronged, neglected, overlooked, misunderstood), and therefore one must do what one could to lighten the load of those with whom one came into contact; that his current state of sorrow was not uniquely his, not at all...

George Saunders' unique storytelling method makes this an intense experience. A collection of historical notes and conversations among cemetery dwellers seems unlikely to succeed, but for me both work harmoniously together.

June Update. Last night we watched The Sixth Sense, in which the child psychologist Bruce Willis works with a child who famously says, "I see dead people." With Bruce's help, the child goes from being terrified and hurt by them to listening to them, and occasionally bringing them comfort. He explains to Bruce that they only see what they want to see. And the big shock in the end is that Bruce, too, is dead, which explains why he and his wife are not connecting well any more. This clarifies the beginning scene where a former patient breaks into their house and, it turns out, kills Bruce. The child tells Bruce to talk to his wife while she's asleep. He does and thus learns he is dead and feels released as he has done what he needed to do, that is, help the child.  I was struck by the parallels with the Saunders' story and realized it may be a case of my ignorance of the genre.

George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo, Random House, 2017, 343 pages. Available at the UVa and public libraries.