Lincoln in the Bardo

Has a novel ever been more jam-packed with characters and dialogue? George Saunders has written a terrific first novel; heretofore previously known for his short stories (which are also terrific and I'm not a short-story fan), he has tackled and conquered the novel form.
A fantastical setting (one setting for the entire novel), populated with hundreds of "souls" who do not realize they are dead, engaging in sometimes hysterical, sometimes heart-breaking conversations, as they await their "recovery" from whatever injury/catastrophe/illness they last recall: wow, quite the entertaining storyline.  This setting is the "Bardo" referenced in the title: a Tibetan term for just that in-between world between the living and the dead.
And "Lincoln" is indeed Abraham Lincoln who, tortured by grief over the death of his young son, Willie, visits the Bardo to grieve and seek solace by remaining close to his son's remains.  Willie Lincoln is one of those souls lost in the Bardo and much of the dialogue and story centers around a cast of eccentric souls advising and comforting Willie to the best of their abilities. In so doing, they share their life stories and it's these stories that are tremendously engaging.
As Saunders beautifully explores the concept of grief, especially at the loss of a child, he takes us inside President Lincoln's processing of this grief.  As Lincoln plumbs the depths of his grieving, he is struck by the tremendous loss of life he considers his responsibility: the thousands of Union soldiers recently killed in battle, and that heavy weight nearly does him in completely.
Such a heavy topic and yet moments of lightness and humor occur and somehow don't feel out of place; what a talented writer Saunders is to have woven all these threads together!
While I strongly recommend this outstanding novel to others, one note: the style of writing Saunders has chosen takes a little getting used to but don't give up! It's well worth the effort!

My rating: **** (4 stars)

The Vegetarian

Winner of the Man Booker International Prize, this novel by Han Kang, translated from the original Korean by Deborah Smith,  is certainly beautifully written and unique.
While short in length, it is a powerful story that will stay with you long after you finish the final, devastating page.
Starting out as the story of a "flat-lined" marriage, it is essentially told from three points of view, none  of which belong to the character referred to in the title: Yeong-hye awakens one morning and informs her husband (the narrator of Part One) that based on a very disturbing dream she has just experienced, she is henceforth a vegetarian.  As Yeong-hye begins to manifest physical symptoms of her extreme vegetarian diet, her family becomes concerned. Her brother-in-law and sister join forces with her husband and parents in attempting (through violent means) to dissuade her from her dietary path, to no avail.
While it may sound simplistic, it is anything but: Kang is addressing much larger issues than diet in her story.  It's really about personal choice versus submission to others.
As Yeong-hye begins to "disappear" into her own fantasy world, the reader feels compelled to choose sides: does Yeong-hye control her own destiny or does she "owe" it to her family to continue her life in a way she finds repellent?

My rating: **** 4 stars

The Underground Railroad

Not since reading Toni Morrison's devastating Beloved, have I been so moved by a novel based on the shameful history of slavery in this country.  Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad takes several pages from this history and uses them to create an imaginative and gut-wrenching story of Cora, a Georgia slave who makes an all-or-nothing attempt to reach freedom in the North.

Cora, a third-generation plantation slave, wrestles with the ghosts of her grandmother and mother as she weighs the pros and cons of an escape . Certainly the punishment if caught was not death (the loss of "property" to the owner) but extensive whipping and further deprivation that left the slave on the edge of death, but just enough alive to be brought back to life for a bleak and never-ending future of forced labor.  

But Cora, urged on by Caesar,  a loved fellow-slave, eventually decides she must be free and thus begins the premise of the novel: Cora's escape.  

Whitehead takes the historical fact of the underground railroad as an overland escape route and reimagines it as an actual underground system of tunnels in which tracks have been laid and abandoned rail cars ferry escapees slowly and with great danger to the North.  Entrance to these tunnels is highly secret and of course any one abetting the runaways is hanged.  Many of the conductors and those leading the runaways are sympathetic whites who pay the ultimate price for their assistance.  

Cora's journey, which is interrupted regularly by terrifying episodes, takes the reader along as Cora emerges along the stops and must, as she progresses through different stops, decide whether to stay at any particular point and live a life in hiding or continue her travels to complete freedom.  

As Cora experiences temporary stays in different states along the route, we experience along with her the multitudes of ways various states are dealing with the "African population."  North Carolina, for example, in a fearful reaction to the growing African population (outnumbering the white population) has made it illegal for anyone of African descent to reside in their state.  Existing slaves have been purchased by the government and forcibly shipped out to Louisiana and Florida, where slaves are in high demand.  Any free blacks attempting to remain in North Carolina will be shot on sight. The North Carolinians are quite proud and pleased with their solution and expressed their opinion of the states taking their exported slaves:

The other states of the cotton empire absorbed the stock; Florida and Louisiana were particularly famished for colored hands, especially the seasoned variety.  A short tour of Bourbon Street forecast the result to any observer: a repulsive mongrel state in which the white race is, through amalgamation with Negro blood, made stained, obscured, confused.  Let them pollute their European bloodlines with Egyptain darkness, produce rivers of halfbreeds, quadroons, and miscellaneous dingy yellow bastards-they forge the very blades that will be used to cut their throats. 

South Carolina, while seemingly welcoming runaway slaves with open arms, is secretly implementing a forced sterilization program as a population control method.  And so it goes.  One horror story after another.  

Whitehead takes the reader's breath away with the sheer ugliness and brutality of these "solutions" and fills at least this reader with shame over this shared history.  And, one must say,  based on the very recent election of our new president,  a sense of dread.  Do we still have drops of this poisonous thinking in our society today? It would seem we might.  And perhaps more than drops. How terrifying is that?

Yet, amidst all this hatred, amidst death, loss, mistreatment, starvation, capture, Cora travels on. Keeps her eye on the prize.  Freedom. For her. For her child. 

Tremendous prices are paid.  

My Rating: **** (Four Stars) 

A Little Life

A Man Booker finalist in 2015 as well a National Book Award finalist, Hanya Yanagihara's novel has been called "subversively brilliant" "dark and disturbing" "an unsettling meditation on sexual abuse, suffering, and the difficulties of recovery" " the arrival  of the great, gay novel" and yes, it is all those things but so much more.

I hesitate to even attempt to write about the profound emotional experience of reading this novel.  Some novels move me to tears and occasional sniffles; A Little Life moved me to great, heaving sobs, with both its horror and its absolute beauty. 

The story opens with four recent graduates of a prestigious Ivy League university working to establish their adult lives in New York City.  Over the course of the next thirty years, Willem, Malcolm, JB and Jude all reach levels of professional success beyond their wildest dreams, but their emotional lives are really the focus of the author.

It would not be right to deprive any reader of experiencing the unfolding of this story: the highs are lovely and the lows are shocking and desperately sad.  But, and this is crucial, the story is beautifully written; the suffering of Jude, the main character is extensively detailed, but it is the very foundation that Jude's life is built upon and therefore quite necessary to the story.  As Jude's experiences as a child are slowly revealed to his three friends, who deeply love him,  they each in their own way try desperately to support and emotionally nourish him.  The friendship between Jude and Willem that slowly evolves into love, is one of the most beautifully portrayed love stories I have ever read.  But can wounds this deep ever really be healed?

Yanagihara deals quite capably with many other complex issues in addition to abuse: racism, sexual identity, male relationships (both hetero and gay), marriage, and especially love (sexual and non-sexual).

A favorite passage:

Relationships never provide you with everything.  They provide you with some things.  You take all the things you want from a person--sexual chemistry, let's say, or good conversation, or financial support or intellectual compatibility, or niceness, or loyalty--and you get to pick three of those things....the rest you have to look for elsewhere.  It's only in the movies that you find someone who gives you all of those things.  But this isn't the movies.  In the real world, you have to identify which three qualities you want to send the rest of our life with, and then you look for those qualities in another person.  That's real life.  Don't you see it's a trap? If you keep trying to find everything, you'll wind up with nothing.

Well said.

In closing, I will just say yes, this deeply affecting novel will remain VERY high on my list of all-time reads that have impacted me in memorable ways.  I'm  one of those readers who believe that when we experience stories that move us, that change or deepen our understanding of others and the world around us, we are reaping the ultimate benefits that reading can offer us: a broadening of perspective, a deeper sense of compassion, and a better understanding of the biases that are in all of us. 

My rating: **** (4 out of 4)

The Little Paris Bookshop

Yep; still in Paris.  I read The Little Paris Bookshop by Nina George about a year ago and am just now getting around to blogging about it.  Good thing I make notations as I read so I can look back and be reminded of favorite sentences, phrases, structure, character.

Nina George's latest novel, an "international best seller" (as I've read numerous times), is a lovely French concoction, meant to be read on a summer afternoon while sipping a sparkling rosé.

We have a bookseller, or as he describes himself: a "literary apothecary".  He is a believer in bibliotherapy, which I happen to believe in as well.  What is bibliotherapy?  It's the process of using books to promote a deeper understanding of oneself so as to work through social and emotional concerns.  Certainly, reading novels can help one put their own life in perspective or context.  I believe it can be especially powerful with children and teens, but valuable as well to adults.  

While our French literary apothecary has some deeply buried (but not for long!) emotional issues himself, he has built his reputation on recommending just the right book for his customers after having particularly discerning (but amazingly brief) conversations with them.  

The author is talented and clever and I enjoyed reading her well-constructed sentences and the ease with which she addressed intangible ideas and feelings that I feel are certainly apart of everyday living.

In this passage, the bookseller, Jéan Perdu, is talking about his mother "suffering from a pain for which there is no antidote":

There are women who only look at another woman's shoes and never at her face.  And others who always look women in the face and only occasionally at their shoes.  My mother preferred the second type; she felt humiliated and misjudged by the former.

There's a lot to think about in those sentences. Perhaps it rang so true for me because I always feel quite invisible when walking by the cosmetics counter in a department store and never being offered a whiff of the new perfume being hawked by the glamorous cosmetician.

Jéan's stated ambition is write an encyclopedia about common emotions:

From A for 'Anxiety about picking up hitchhikers' to E for 'Early risers' smugness' to Z for 'Zealous toe concealment'.

That made me laugh out loud; especially the early risers' remark which I feel is particularly apt! But that's probably because I've never been one! Plus I'm a firm believer in the fact that I can get as much dome from 10pm til midnight as any early riser can from 5am to 7am! Unless it demands sunlight,  of course, which is one of my least favorite things anyway!

The Little Paris Bookshop is filled with the obligatory eccentric characters that live in Jéan's apartment building, as well as the quirky and emotionally troubled friends who end up traveling with him when he finally decides to unmoor his bookshop (which is located on a barge) and set out to solve the mystery of his long-ago lost love.  There is no shortage of romance with a bit of "bromance" thrown in as well!

Nothing extraordinary about The Little Paris Bookshop, but it was a pleasant-enough read...or was it the rosé?

And thus ends my apparent "Novels set in Paris" rut.  Adiéu!

My rating 2 and 1/2 ** (out of 4)

The Red Notebook

My last post to this blog (embarrassingly long ago) was about lovers in the City of Love: Paris.  Let's just stay in Paris for awhile. Why not?

The Red Notebook by Antoine Laurain, translated from the French by Emily Boyce and Jane Aitken, could not be more opposite from the previous novel I last posted. The setting is in common yes, but that's about it.  While Lovers at the Chameleon Club was dark, brooding, turbulent and perhaps some might say, slightly twisted, The Red Notebook is whimsical, lightly philosophical, and as several reviewers have mentioned, filled with joie de vivre.  It is warm and charming, with eccentric characters that you just know will most likely end up okay, even though life has handed them a few bumps and bruises along the way.

The story centers around a lost purse found by a French gentleman who becomes quite fixated on finding its owner.  As he delves into the items in the purse, including a red notebook which he is deeply intrigued by, he begins to imagine the lovely lady it must belong to and longs to meet her.

Charming coincidences abound.  Think Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn.  You get the idea.

Something quite important to note: in addition to the lovely story, the stylish and well-structured prose adds nothing but pleasure to the experience.

"Can you experience nostalgia for something that hasn't happened? We talk of 'regrets' about the course of our lives, when we are almost certain we have taken the wrong decision; but one can also be enveloped in a sweet and mysterious euphoria, a sort of nostalgia for what might have been."

Save this novel for a time when something light and breezy and romantic is required: after a heavy read or when you just want to escape to Paris for a few hours and indulge your romantic fantasies.

My rating: **1/2

Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris, 1932

Francine Prose has gathered quite the cavalcade of eccentric, intriguing characters in her latest novel: Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris, 1932.  Most of the characters in this work of historical fiction are based on real-life people, just not people like you or me.

Prose has stated that her work was originally inspired by a black and white photo she saw while visiting the National Gallery in Washington about fifteen years ago. Intrigued by a photo titled Lesbian Couple at Le Monocle, 1932, depicting the cross-dressing French athlete-turned-Gestapo-henchwoman,Violette Morris, and her lover, Prose began considering writing Morris' biography. Soon Prose was completely captivated by the bohemian, some might say decadent pre-World War II culture of Paris with its anything-goes lifestyle.

Go on.....tell me more....

And she does; in great detail and with great story-telling power. The narrative structure of the novel keeps us on our toes. With a constant shifting of narrators and perspectives, the story moves forward at a quick pace. We see the protagonist, named Louisianne (later called Lou) in the novel, as a child separated from her family in order to protect her from an emotionally disturbed older brother.  We see her progression through life as a study in the genesis of evil, and with adequate foreshadowing, understand that Lou is destined to do terrible acts against her government, her country and her friends. We also understand that Lou has been the recipient of acts of evil and cannot help but reflect on how the treatment Lou received as a child and young woman are powerful determinants in the direction her life takes.

Lovers... is populated with many other historically based characters as well: the Hungarian photographer who took the black and white photo which inspired Prose, and the egomaniacal writer based on Henry Miller, among others. These characters and more contribute to the narration of the story. Towards the end of her turbulent life, Lou establishes what she believes to be a strong, personal relationship with Hitler and it is this delusional relationship that drives her actions.

I found the novel to be highly engaging, although a little on the long side. The heavy foreshadowing perhaps contributed to my occasional impatience with the speed with which the plot unfolded. This novel is for the patient reader who is not distracted but intrigued by shifting narrators and perspective.    
I found the story very engrossing and spent time delving into the real-life counterparts of many of the characters while reading the novel which added to my level of engagement.

Just as it's true that history changes depending on who tells it, so does a story.

My rating ***