Booklog for Charlotte

Books to Read

Autumn by Ali Smith. Rec by Jen. Public library

Sharon Begley: Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain. Dorothy mentioned Begley. Public Library

Gabrielle Zevin:  Young Jane Young reviewed by Ron Charles here. The video review is a good one, especially the tweet storm.

Golden Hill by Francis Spufford reviewed by Tony. Bad reviews for audiobook production. 

Books by Mollie Panter-Downes. Letters from London (columns from the New Yorker) at the Jeff-Mad, others at UVa.

terra Nullius by Claire Coleman. reviewed by ANZ Litlovers.  Kindle version available.

Sargent's Women:  Four lives behind the canvas by Donna Lucey. Reviewed in the NYT and the Wash. Post.

The Body in the Clouds by Ashley Hay. Reviewed in the NYT.

The Boy Behind the Curtain by Tim Winton. Short fiction and essays. Reviewed in the Guardian. Audiobook read by Winton.

The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey. Recommended by Mariflo, reviewed by Ron Charles.

The Ninth Hour by Alice McDermott. Reviewed by Lily King in the Post.

Five new Australian books listed by Kim.

Mary Beard. Audiobook narrator is not good.

1947 When Now Begins by Elisabeth Asbrink

Real American: A Memoir by Julia Lythcott-Haims. Jenna Wortham endorsed.

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion. Public Library. Warmly endorsed by Laura.

Belleview Square by Michael Redhill. Winner of the Giller AND Shadow Giller Prize. Kim's review.

The Easter Parade by Richard Yates. Recommended by Tony.

Museum of Modern Love by Heather Rose

Careful, He Might Hear You by Sumner Locke Elliott

This went on my list of books to read some months ago, but it moved it when I noted how much Kim of Reading Matters enjoyed it recently. First published in 1963 this is the story of a boy whose mother died shortly after he was born, brought up by his aunts in Sydney during the Depression. He is known as P.S., so anointed by his mother when she knew she would not survive. in her view he would be all that others had of her after she was gone.

When we meet, he is six years old and has been cared for by the unimaginative, plodding Lila and her husband George. P.S. spends the occasional day with Vere, a flamboyant character who always makes him laugh. Another sister, Agnes, spends all her time and energy at the Temple of Everlasting Love preparing for the end of the world, expected to arrive in a few months. Sinden, P.S.'s late mother, said, "You should only listen to every nineteenth thing Agnes says but then you should listen very carefully." And finally there's Vanessa, the beautiful sister who latched onto an aunt with plenty of money. They live in London, but the tale begins when Vanessa decided it was time to come back to Sydney and make P.S. her own.

The locations in Sydney, in particular ferries from Circular Quay feature in the book so that occasionally map consultation is in order. Agnes' Temple is near Balmoral Bay and she mentions hearing the zoo animals. It was nice to note on the map that the Taronga Zoo is very close. The characters have that zany quality that I associate with characters in Australian novels. 

So this is the story of a custody dispute, one of my least favorite plot lines. It did make me a bit squirmy, but it wasn't intolerable as the characters are all so odd as to be unreal. According to Wikipedia the author was the subject of a fierce custody battle by his aunts. Knowing that makes the sections told from the point of view of the child more poignant. Elliott left Australia in 1948 and later became an American citizen. He wrote more than 30 plays for "the Golden Age of live television dramas," as Wikipedia has it. 

Sumner Locke Elliott, Careful, He Might Hear You, Harper & Row, 1963, 339 pages. Available at the UVa library and from Amazon. 

Exit West by Mohsin Hamid

Much as I appreciated his previous book, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, I was not prepared this brilliant work. The tone of the book is an unemotional telling of the upheaval of societies throughout the world in the near future. The audiobook, read by Hamid himself made the recounting of the most dramatic events told in a calm voice all the more disquieting. 

As we are introduced to the main characters, an independent young woman and a pious young man who live in an unnamed Muslim city, that country is overwhelmed by a fundamentalist-led revolution. Nadia left her family household to live on her own while Saeed lived and prayed with his parents. They are thrown together by circumstances:  after Saeed's mother is killed and it is unsafe for Nadia to live alone, she moves in with Saeed and his father who regards her as his daughter. Nadia and Saeed are interested in each other sexually, but Saeed wants to be celibate, in a limited way, until they marry. 

When the war makes life in their country intolerable, the father urges them to leave, but declines to go himself. They begin to hear stories of about doors.

Rumors had begun to circulate of doors that could take you elsewhere, often to places far away, well removed from this deathtrap of a country. Some people claimed to know people who knew people who had been through such doors. A normal door, they said, could become a special door and it could happen without warning to any door at all....Nadia and Saeed discussed these rumors and dismissed them....Each of the doors became partially animate as well with a subtle power to mock, to mock the desire of those who desire to go far away, whispering silently from its door frame that such dreams were the dreams of fools.

The rumors were true and when Saeed and Nadia went through one of the doors, they found the passage to be as had been described, both like dying and being born. Thus begins their new life which later took them to London where empty houses, parks, and unused lots which had become vacant were being used by immigrants. In certain areas legal residents were in a minority and eventually nativist extremists began forming militias.

In this threatening and dangerous atmosphere, Saeed developed an interest in moving to a house where people from their home country lived, while Nadia began to take in active role in the governance in the house where they lived with mainly Nigerians. He was drawn to his own kind while Nadia developed more of an identity with the other refugees. The tribalism throughout London began to be replaced by the distinction between those who want to be able to go through the doors and those who guard the doors.

At the last moment the nativists stepped back from the brink of expelling (or slaughtering) the immigrants and recognized that the doors could not be eliminated without wholesale killing. Their sense of decency changed their course. The lives of Nadia and Saeed, as well as the other immigrants took a more mundane turn, living in worker camps to create infrastructure for the expanded population.

Later they go through the doors again to California and found those who considered themselves native were, like the Londoners, stunned by the changes in their homeland. Another "layer of nativeness was composed of those who others thought directly descended even in the tiniest fraction of their genes from the human beings who had been brought from Africa to this continent centuries ago as slaves. While this layer of nativeness was not vast in proportion to the rest, it had vast importance for society had been shaped in reaction to it and unspeakable violence had occurred in relation to it." The story of an old Chinese woman who had lived in the same house all her life, through the death of her first husband, then the second one. She had known the names of everyone on her street, but now she knew no one; with the advent of the doors, all sorts of people arrived and they all seemed more at home than she was.  "And when she went out, it seemed to her that she too had migrated, that everyone migrates even if we stay in the same houses our whole lives because we can't help it. We're all migrants through time."

Nadia and Saeed found their way independently in this society and while they grew apart, they maintained a connection in case one  needed help from the other. A lifetime later, Nadia returned to the city of her birth; there she met with Saeed and they shared tea and memories of their lives together and apart.

It is rare to read a book that is so successful at both the intimate stories of the lives of individual characters and a dramatic theme that is global. And in this case the message about the global politics is timely:  The movement of individuals throughout the world has never been easier while the desire to limit it so strong. I hope his optimism about the nativist urge of Londoners (and others) being restrained by their decency is warranted.

 Mohsin Hamid, Exit West, Riverhead Books, 2017 240 pages (I listened to the audiobooks). Available in the UVa and public library and from Amazon.

The Free World by David Bezmozgis

Having loved his 2014 book The Betrayers, I was happy to find David Bezmozgis had an earlier novel. This one tells the stories of two generations of a Jewish family from Latvia. The moment at hand is their time in 1978 as they and others have been allowed to leave the Soviet bloc and have made it as far as Rome on their way to a permanent location. Though we hear the story and thoughts of several characters, Alec is the main focus. He is described by his wife Polina as childlike and in contrast to her sister, his childishness seemed to protect him from the world whereas her sister's seemed to expose her. His charming whimsy convinced Polina to leave her husband, her beloved sister and parents and join his family in looking for a new life.

Alec's brother Karl is the ruthless and practical one who manages everyone. His wife Rosa is notable in that she alone wants to go to Israel, while the others prefer the US, Canada, or Australia. But it is Samuil their father whose presence limits their options. He didn't want to come as he had been an ardent Communist since his teenage years and had been powerful and successful in Riga. His Jewish roots became displaced during the time after the Russian Revolution when the White army killed his father. The complications of those years are shown by the story of his uncle who "fought with the tsar against the Germans, then with the Germans against the Bolsheviks, and then with the Latvians against the Germans again." He explains, "I fought with the tsar because I was young and foolish. I fought with the Germans because the Bolsheviks tried to close the shops and the synagogues. And I fought with the Latvians because the Germans wouldn't leave."

In this book about the various displacements and upheavals in the lives of this family, comes Polina's thoughts written to her sister about the value of order and routine. In Rome she took a job with a modest salary in a shop that sells leather goods. Alec thinks it's foolish for her to do that rather than exploring the splendors of Rome. She says, "But it's hard to explain to him that I miss order and I miss routine. For that I am prepared to forgo splendors." She was grateful that when she woke up each morning, she would have someplace to go.

Alec and Polina take up an offer to share an apartment with a man named Lyova who had left Latvia years before with his family. They lived in Israel for years, but he left his wife and family to return to Rome in order to try to gain admittance for the family to another country. When Samuil tells Lyova that what he seeks doesn't exist, Lyova explains, "I'm not looking for perfection. So far I've been a citizen of two utopias. Now I have modest expectations. Basically, I want the country with the fewest parades."

The dramas, great and modest, in the lives of this family are captured in the portrayals of their lives during that year. One wonders how much is autobiographical as David Bezmozgis was born in Riga, Latvia in 1973. Perhaps that helps explain why the characters are so real. 

David Bezmozgis, The Free World, Farrar. Straus and Giroux, 2011, 354 pages. Available in the UVa and public libraries and from Amazon.

The Gingerbread Woman by Jennifer Johnston

I was unfamiliar with this Irish author and listened to the audiobook as a result of Reading Matters' enthusiasm for her books. 

The plot had some very familiar elements, but a variation that I found quite appealing. The main character is a free-spirited woman who does free-lance writing and lands temporary university posts lecturing on Irish literature. Clara has just returned from one of these gigs in New York City to her cottage by the sea not far from Dublin. Her disastrous affair in New York is revealed to us bit by bit as she writes notes for her book "The Gingerbread Woman." It will have "a touch of the tragic, the comic, both there inherent in the title, 'run, run as fast as you can, you can't catch me, I'm the gingerbread man,' or should I say 'woman.'" She has recently had major surgery that we know is somehow related to this affair; she chafes under the care of her mother (known to make jam at every turn) and her doctor.

Clara meets another damaged soul Lawrence and his dog Pansy while they are out walking. I felt I had read his story before: a man made happy and fully human by a wonderful woman; the woman and their young child die tragically. Still, Lar (as he is called) becomes a vibrant character. He is a teacher, but at the moment is unmoored and wandering around aimlessly, staying is hotels. Clara, in her free-spirited way, invites him to stay a few days at her house and they manage to comfort each other. The variation is that this is not a love story, they do not become romantically involved; they just irritate and engage with each other by turns. This level of human contact helps each of them and by the time Lar departs, they both seem to be on the mend.

I enjoyed the Irish reader and noted a couple of phrases I particularly like. Having lived in London, Paris, and New York, Clara describes herself this way:  "I am by way of being the cosmopolitan one in the family." She tells about her mother giving her sister advice. Her mother said that no man was worth breaking your heart over after Rosie had been dumped by a man. " 'Particularly not that man,' I misguidedly put in my tuppence worth, at which point they both turned and ate the face off me."

Lawrence is from County Antrim and The Troubles, while not a part of the story, do have a tangential role. Early on in their time together Clara sets out the rule that she doesn't want to hear about the North, "No North in this house. I don't mind you talking about your wife, your child, your mother, your hopes and fears, your punctured dreams, but not the North. None of the gutted-by-history crap. Don't pollute my house with that. When you want to have that conversation, we'll go to the pub or walk in the rain."

The frank kindness of families, friends, and strangers is the heart of this engaging story.

Jennifer Johnson, The Gingerbread Woman, Headline Book Publishing, 2000, 224 pages (I listened to the audiobook). Available only from Amazon. Other works by her are in the UVa and public libraries.

Purple Threads by Jeanine Leane

Booklogforcharlotte.com is the location for my new blog where you will be able to find this post and others like it. This site will remain until winter of 2019.

Recently this 2011 book came to my notice by way of ANZ LitLovers LitBlog and having read Lisa's review as well as Sue's review at Whispering Gums, decided I would read it. July 2-9 is NAIDOC (National Aborigines and Islanders Day Observance Committee) Week and ANZ LitLovers is celebrating with Indigenous Literature Week. What good fortune this was for me:  this is a terrific read and raised my spirits considerably.

The author tells the story of a girl much like herself growing up with her Aboriginal grandmother and two Aunties (Boo and Bubby). Her grandfather who died before she had much memory of him, was a white farmer. The narrator''s mother was the youngest of their children, Petal, who was spoiled by her older sisters and never was good about sticking around. She left home at 17 and came back only to have her babies, Sunshine (the narrator) and Star.

Sunshine only learned how different her life was from others when she went to school. She didn't have the "right" answers to questions the teacher asked. When asked when she went to bed, she said, "I don't go to bed, Miss Chapel, I jus' fall asleep." When asked about the number of dogs she had, she said, "Two big dogs an' five little ones, Miss Chapel. An' there's cats an' sheep too." In bad weather the sheep slept in the house. Auntie Boo often found sickly lambs and brought them home for Aunty Bubby to nurse to health. They used the wool to make sweaters, but never killed them for meat.

When Petal and the girls' father Dinny took the girls to live in Queensland with his Catholic family, the Aunties knew this would not last. Sunny overheard Dinny's parents' conversation:

'She's not a full-blood, Paddy drawled, 'She's got some white in her. Looks to me like she's less than half Abo. And the kids, you can hardly tell. One of them even looks a bit like our Dinny in the face.'

'What! Have you taken leave of your senses? Even one drop is too much. She's lazy and useless, and vain and surly.'

Not long after Sunny asks her mother what an Abo is, they go home.

The Aunties had worked as domestics for white farmers. Aunty Boo had read to an older woman in the family she worked for when the woman could no longer read. This way Auntie Boo read philosophers and learned about the Punic Wars and paid close attention to the tactics of Roman women in the exercise of power. When Sunny lamented being different from everyone else, Auntie Boo said,

'Hey, Epictetus told a good story about being' different.' She paused and took a long whistling breath. She could switch from home talk to flash talk when she wanted to. 'When Epictetus' mates told him he should be more like everyone else, he came back real smart like an' said to 'em, Because you consider yourself to be only one thread of those that are on a toga it is fitting that you take care how you should be like the rest of men, just as the thread has no design to be anything superior to other threads. But I wish to be purple, that small part which is bright and makes everything else graceful and beautiful. Why then do you tell me to make myself like many? And if I do, how shall I still be purple?' 

Sunny was not convinced, but Auntie Boo told her she was born to be purple. And black too. It was the warmth of the family life in that household, as well as the tone of taking life as it came their way that won my enthusiasm.

Jeanine Leane is a Wiradjuri woman who grew up in the area of southwest New South Wales near Gundagai. She is a poet, teacher, and an academic. 

 Jeanine Leane, Purple Threads, University of Queensland Press, 2011, 169 pages (I read the kindle version). Only available in print from Amazon.