Burnt Shadows
by Kamila Shamsie
(Picador Paperback Original, 2009)

 There are novels you read and enjoy in spite of their faults. Burnt Shadows by Kamila Shamsie is one of those novels.  The novel’s bold political-historical settings of Nagasaki (1947), Delhi (1947), Pakistan (1982-3), and Afghanistan and New York (2001-2) bring an original vision to the nuclear conflict and it’s implications in the current War-on-Terror climate. 

 

In spite of a large cast of characters and shifting points of view, this novel’s story is centered on Hiroko, a Japanese linguist in Nagasaki, who loses here German fiancé to the nuclear blast and is left with scars shaped like swans from her kimono burned into her back.  Shamsie tries to set up an Eastern Family versus Western Family conflict, but this thread of the novel is weak. Hiroko’s dead fiance’s sister, who she travels to India to meet, that sister’s son, Harry, his daughter, Kim … none can hold a candle to the depth and passion of Hiroko’s story, especially early in the novel (before her grown Pakistani son, Raza takes over the plot with his complicated connections with the Afghani militants, the Taliban, the CIA and its contractors). To Shamsie’s credit, the plot she manages in terms of time jumps, variety of locations, and its generational-Roots-like characters is not an easy one.  And many of the balls she’s thrown up in the air, she does catch, bringing a myriad of stories to satisfying conclusions.  However, her prose and characters suffer for having too much going on.  Here’s a sample of how graceful Shamsie’s prose can be.

 

“Hiroko steps out on to the verandah.  Her body from neck down a silk column, white with three black cranes swooping across her back.  She looks out towards the mountains, and everything is more beautiful to her than it was early this morning.  Nagasaki is more beautiful to her than ever before.”

 

Shamsie uses simple yet visceral details that speak to the character’s emotions.

Now, here’s a far too common example of Shamsie making her prose to do too much work – filling the reader in on time/place details while giving a character something innocuous to do that does little to inform the reader of that character’s emotional state. 

 

“Harry Burton tilted his whisky glass towards his mouth and wondered, not for the first time since his arrival in Pakistan, if the paper napkins wrapped around the glasses were designed to prevent condensation formatting and turning fingers clammy or to keep the contents of glasses masked in the capital of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.”

 

It truly is difficult to connect with a character who’s ruminating about paper napkins. And, unfortunately, prose like this is more common than prose like in the other paragraph.

 

I applaud Shamsie’s efforts.  To take on nuclear war and terrorism in one novel and not have that novel turn into a one-sided piece of political propaganda, says she did more right than wrong. Reading Burnt Shadows was a worthwhile, and occasionally rewarding, experience. 

The Song is You
by Arthur Phillips
(Random House, 2009)

Are you in the mood for a mournful romance? Are you in one of those people who connect the definitive moments of your life with a song? Then The Song is You by Arthur Phillips is for you. In spite of supposed fulltime employment as a video director, Julian Donahue has too much time of his hands -- time to mourn the fairly recent loss of his toddler son, the even more recent demise of his marriage, and parental losses from bygone years. He is tethered to his Ipod and has such deep connections to his playlists that one suspects he’s retreated not only from pain but also all the way to a second adolescence. Enter Cait O’Dwyer – up-and-coming twenty-something Irish rock star whose songs Julian keeps shuffling to the head of the pack. Julian catches her performance in a local club and leaves notes and cartoons filled with muse-like advice on the back of bar coasters. They catch her attention and they play an ultimately cloying game of cat and mouse for the rest of the novel. While I prefer Nick Hornby’s Hi-Fidelity take on the boy-in-love with music, playlists and women, Julian’s damaged soul has a certain appeal. Phillips adds a goofball, Jeopardy-loving brother and a has-been rock star to the cast to lighten the book’s heavy dramatic load, but in the end, it’s Phillips Rushdie-like prose pirouettes, which makes The Song is You a book you won’t be sorry you read. Good writing goes a long way towards improving a mediocre story and overwrought characters.    

 

'

The Portable Dorothy Parker
edited by Marion Meade
(Penguin Classic, 2006)

Since I can't get enough of Parker from my New Yorker archives I decided to pick up this 600 pg. "portable" Parker.  It's already been come in quite handy while I was finishing up my review of A Jury of Her Peers for Critical Distance.  I decided to check out some of Parker's reviews from the late 1950's which she published in Esquire and happily stumbled upon this review on Kerouac's The Subterraneans.  Here's the opening paragraphs: 

"Mr. Kerouac, possibly the inventor and certainly the historian of the Beat Generation, calls his latest work The Subterraneans.  The Subterraneans are 'hip without being slick, they are intellignet without being corny, they are intellectual as hell and know all about Pound without being pretentious or talking too much about it, they are very quiet, they are very Christlike.' So those are the Subterraneans.  The only point in the summary with which I can agree is that they are hip; or, as Grandma used to say, hep.
Doubtless my absence of excitement over Mr. Kerouac's characters is due to a gaping lack in me, for, and I regret the fact, I do not dig bop.  I cannot come afire when I hear it, and I am even less ecstatic in reading about it. I am honestly sorry about this, for who could not do with a spot of ecstasy now and then?  I envy the generation its pleasure in its music.  And that is all I envy it."

I can't help wondering how Annie Proulx feels about  having the distinction of bookending the subtitle of A Jury of Her Peers:  American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx.  She does not seem the kind of writer who yearns to be cast in the role of preeminent representative of American women writer's.   I keep circling the idea that Showalter strikes the wrong note by ending her study with Proulx, a writer who has chosen to address primarily male characters and themes in her work.  On one hand, this does show that women have come a long way, baby: "We can write about any damn thing we want!" Then again, one of the marvelous moments in reading A Jury of Her Peers is realizing that, really, that's what we've been doing all along.

The Christmas 2000 edition of The New Yorker has a wonderful essay by Proulx, "Big Skies, Empty Places," where she talks about why she writes about what men.  Perhaps Showlater should've included this in her section about Proulx.  It certainly would've added a bit more spice to an otherwise rather anemic ending:

"When people ask me why women are rarely the major protagonists in my stories and novels, I try to explain absent presence.  I am interested in the rural world, and in that world it is men and men's work, whether logging or fishing or running cattle or growing soybeans, that dominate the culture and the history of the region.  Yes, women do drive tractors, load steers, haul nets, run ranches, but more commonly theirs is an absent presence in rural events."   

Oxford American Writer's Thesaurus

Came across this quite personal "Word Note" by Francine Prose about the word "share" in Oxford American's Writer's Thesaurus.  {BTW:  Here's William Saffire's thought-provoking take from this past Sunday's NYT magazine on the merging of dictionaries and thesauruses) I can't help but marvel over personal biases we have towards words.  We all have our idiosyncracies, but frankly, I never thought twice about using the phrase "share a story" until I read this passage by Francine Prose.  I'm not convinved that it's an inappropriate usage of the word, but I certainly will mind be careful not to "share stories"  I ever find myself in the presence of Ms. Prose.

"Try as I might, I will never be able t bring myself to use this word to mean 'to tell a story' or  'to make a confession.' Thank you for sharing that sad account of your most embarrassing moment.  In my view, the object of the verb should be a real or abstract commodity, not a narrative. [NB: If a narrative isn't real or abstract, what is it?] The king was deposed because he refused to share his wealth and power.  Perhaps it's because, in the more old-fashioned usage, sharing (and, by extension, whatever was being shared) was an inarguably good thing.  Children should be taught to share their toys.  But being invited to share our personal history can feel like an invasion of privacy [NB - yes, but isn't that implicit in the act?] and when someone else shares in that way, it's possible that the process can turn out to be a burden or an imposition, rather than a deseriable act of unselfishness and generosity."

Break Every Rule:
Essays on Language, Longing, and Moments of Desire
by Carole Maso
(Counterpoint, 2000)

Deeper into my research of my review of Showalter's A Jury of Her Peers and I'm wondering why she didn't include Carole Maso. Her writing is strong, experimental and very female.  Can't quite explain that last bit ... what is "female" writing?  But I know in a blind "taste" test -- I'd pick her works out as feminine every time.  Here's an excerpt from her essay collection -- Break Every Rule.  Though published back in 2000, she has some interesting thoughts on print vs eword.  I wonder where she weighs in on the Kindle debate?

"May we begin a dialogue there in the future.  May we learn something from each other.  Electronic writing will help us to think about impermancence, facility, fragility, and freedom, spatial intensities, irreverences, experimentation, new worlds, clean slates.  Print writing will allow us new respect for the mark on the page, the human hand, the erasure, the hesitation, the mistake.

Electronic writing will give us a deper understanding of the instability of texts, of worlds.

Print writing will remind us of our love for the physical, for the sensual world. And for the light only a book held in one's hands can give.  The book taken to bed or the beach -- the words dancing with the heat and the sea -- the mouth suddenly on my salty neck.

Electroinic writing shall inspire magic.  Print writing shall inspire magic.  Ways to heal."

The Paris Review Interviews:
Women Writers at Work
edited by George Plimpton
(Modern Library Paperbacks, 1998)

In preparation for my review of Showalter's A Jury of Her Peers, I've been reading lots of works by and about women writers lately.  In the course of my research, I pulled out my copy of Women Writers at Work and found this interview with Nadine Gordimer.  I read a lot of Gordimer's work in the 1990's but not much lately.  Finding this interview felt like being reunited with an old friend, and a younger version of myself.  Here's a snippet of what she has to say.  If you don't have this book and you are at all interested in women writers, you can find good used copies at Albris. 

"Lots of novelists say they don't read other novelists, contemporary ones.  If this is true, it's a great pity.  Imagine, if you had lived in the nineteenth century and not read the writers that we now turn back to so lovingly, or even if you had lived in the twentieth century and hadn't read Lawrence or Hemingway, Virginia Woolf and so on.  At different times in my life I've -- liked is not the word -- I've been psychologically dependent upon different writers.  Some have remained influential in my life and some haven't, and some I suppose I've forgotten and do them an injustice by not mentioning. 
When I first began to write, I wrote short stories, and of course I still do; I've written a great many.  It's a form that I love to write and to read.  I was very influenced by American, southern, short-story writers.  Eudora Welty was a great influence on me.  Years later, when I met Eudora, visited her in Jackson, there were such parallels between the way she was living, even then, and my life:   a black man was mowing the lawn!  There was a kind of understanding."

Charles Dickens died on this day in 1870.  The time is long overdue for me to reread my favorite Dickens' novels, and maybe a few I missed the first time around.  No matter how far I travel in my literary tastes, Dickens always delights me.  I have this sentimental image of myself old and bedbound with some kind soul who visits and reads me Dickens day in and day out.  That would be the way to go...

To honor my literary hero, here is one of my favorite opening paragraphs of all time.  Yes, I think, David Copperfield must be added to my summer reading list....

Chapter 1
I am Born
"Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages  must show.  To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o'clock at night.  It was remarked that the clock began to strike, and I began to cry simultaneously."

 

Issue 10:  Fear Itself

While this issue of the Pen Journal is packed with goodies, not the least of which is the opening forum on the topic of fear, I couldn't resist a blog entry with a Michael Ondaatje quote on writing from his interview with Colum McCann entitled, "Without a Map."  I remeber reading an interview with John Irving from the 1990's where he said he has to plot out every bit of his novels and know exactly what the ending is before he begins.  It would be fun to see a verbal duel between Ondaatje and Irving over this topic. 

"I guess what drives me when I am writing a book is not, for instance, an overall plot that I've prepared.  It's finding someone you can live with for four or five years on the page.  Then that person meets somebody else and you have a community of people who interact.  The real pleasure of writing is making a portrait of that person in the most complex way -- and the most compassionate way, hopefully.  And there is also the pleasure of learning things about bridge building and jazz and so forth." 

Mules and Men
by Zora Neale Hurston
(Harper Perennial Classic)

I'm deep into Elaine Showalter's A Jury of Her Peers in preparation for my critical review for Daniel Green's new ejournal Critical Distance.  Not able to squeeze a woman's literary studies course into my undergrad and grad school course schedule, I'm relieved to be filling in the gaps in my education on American women writers.  While I have read Zora Neale Hurston's classic Their Eyes Were Watching God, Showalter lists some of Hurston's early, less popular works.  A little digging in my New Yorker archives revealed Hurston's first mention in the October 12, 1935 edition, a very favorable review of Mules and Men.  That title brilliantly describes American men of all races  -- hard-working, long-suffering, and stubborn as hell when you push them too far.  Here's the review in its entirety and you can find good used copies of this book on Alibris. 

"Mules and Men, by Zora Neale Hurston, with a foreword by Franz Boas and 10 black-and-white illustrations by Miguel Covarrubias.  This catalogues as American Negro folklore, but the rubber stamp gives no hint of the delightful qualities of Miss Hurston's book.  Here are authentic Negro songs, fables, sermons, and stories caught almont in the act of creation, for Miss Hurston went down among her own people, made them talk, laugh, and sing, and never once aroused any suspicion that she was an anthropoligist.  A feature of the book is the large collection of voodoo rituals, formulas, and charms.  Miss Hurston ties her material together with a running personal narrative that has a curiously fresh and joyful quality.  Altogether a volume no less charming than valuable."
 

In The Kitchen
by Monica Ali
(Doubleday, 2009)

I've watched way too many old BBC episodes of Gorden Ramsey's Kitchen Nightmares.  That was proven as I worked my way through Monica Ali's latest novel In the Kitchen. Illegal aliens in the kitchen?  Check. Fake flowers on the tables? Check. Problems with executive sous chefs? Check.  Chef goes mad? Check.  That said, initially, I couldn't put this book down.  It opened with a murder and for some crazy reason I thought I would find out who did it.  Silly me!  Well, I guess I might've figured it out, but I was too exhausted at the end to care.  I was morbidly fascinated by Gabe, the main character and head chef of a posh hotel restaurant, after the death of a Russian night porter in the chef's pantry is ruled an accidental death and the novel twists away from murder mystery into  Gabe's breakdown.  But, for some reason I kept thinking more would come of this death, especially because Gabe was so haunted by it.  Silly me!

 There was a point where I was loving all the bad decisions Gabe was making. No, he's not going to keep the poor Slavic Lena near-captive in his apartment!  Why, yes ... he is!  He won't confess this to his girlfriend!  Why yes, he will!  He's not going to walk out just before a huge important dinner service!  Why yes, he will!  But when he ends up having a breakdown and picking onions with illegal immigrants out on a god-forsaken farm?!  Well, that was it!  Yes, the backstory of his crazy mom supported his breakdown, but frankly, he became such a dark crazy Gabe, so utterly removed from the sensitive, ambitious chef I'd fallen for early in the novel that, well, it just didn't work for me.  (Frankly, I hate that copout phrase, but it really does describe how I feel.)

I loved Ali's Alentejo Blue and Brick Lane, and will not abandon her work because of this one misstep.  But truly, if you loved her other books, stay away from this one. Instead watch the Kitchen Nightmares episode where the humiliated chef hides from Ramsey and refuses to let him in the restaurant or answer his phone calls.  It'll amount to about the same experience. 
 

The Museum of Unconditional Surrender
by Dubravka Ugresic
(New Directions, 1999)

On the disappointing news that Dubravka Ugresic, though a finalist, was not the winner of this year's Man Booker International Prize (that distinction went to Alice Munro), I thought I'd put down a few thoughts on the Ugresic novel I just finished, The Museum of Unconditional Surrender.  As is the case with Ugresic's most recent collection of essays, Nobody's Home, The Museum of Unconditional Surrender assembles the life of an exile through the artifacts leftover from her former life -- from yellowed photographs to flower-covered notebooks, a snow globe, or an apple rose.  Each artifact opens a narrative door on the exiled narrator's life -- her past in Zagreb and her present in Berlin.  The narrative is anything but linear and is more like a scrapbook assembled in words.  This is not to say that the Ugresic's prose is weak.  To the contrary, her prose has a muscular force to it that is best illustrated by example.  Lovers of the works ofSusan  Sontag, Carol Maso or Jeanette Winterson will most assuredly the works of Ugresic. 

"Once I noticed a little triptych in one of the albums:  three photographs of her [the narrator's mother], arranged next to each other.  On the first she could have been about twenty, on the second thirty and on the third about forty.  The most recent picture of her was off in the corner, outside the triptych.
"I've aged terribly, haven't I?"
"No," I said, examining the photographs carefully. 
Covering a distance of some ten years with each picture, her face certainly had changed.  Its roundness turned into an oval, her big brown eyes grew smaller and became somehow slanted, her full lips became flatter and lost their appealing pout, two lines by her mouth began in her thirties to turn downwards, in her forties there were already barely perceptible little pouches on either side of her face.  By the most recent photograph her mouth was visibly saggling sadly.
"No," I said once more, closing the album.
When I picked up the same album again later, the triptych had been removed, the pictures rearranged and the newest, the one with the sagging mouth, had disappeared for ever."

 

TQC is live here!  This edition is chock full of reviews including my own of Andrey Platonov's The Foundation Pit.   Also, I feel very fortunate to have my Landscape in Concrete review from Open Letters chosen as National Book Critic's Circle Featured Review of the Week.     

Hope everyone had as happy and celebratory of a weekend as I have!  Cheers! 

Baba Yaga Laid an Egg
by Dubravka Ugresic
(Canongate, 2009)

In preparation for my article on Dubravka Ugresic for the fall edition of The Quarterly Conversation, I couldn't pass up the chance to jump over to Amazon.com.uk and pick up Canongate's lovely edition of Baba Yaga Laid an Egg. This book is part of Canongate's The Myths series in which authors re-tell classic myths in "contempory and memorable ways."  AS Byatt, Jeanette Winterson, Alexander McCall Smitth, Donna Tartt, and Margaret Atwood are but a few of the other authors that have participated in this series. 

Baba Yaga is a classic Russian folktale of which there are numerous variations, but all involving an old Witch.  I started Ugresic's book last night during yet another bout of insomnia and it was anything but sleep-inducing.  Ugresic' has turned this myth into a tale of a woman who approaches aging like a battle, and she's not going to be defeated easily.   Do we really expect any less of Ugresic?  I'm loving this book and continue to look forward to reading all that she offers us.  Here's a taste of why:

"She threw out all her black clothes.  Before, she would never have worn bright colours; now, she was forever wearing a red shirt or one of two blouses the colour of young grass. When we called a taxi, she refused to get in if it was black. (Call another cab.  I'm not getting into this one!) She tucked away the pictures of her parents, her sister, my father, which she used to keep in frames on the shelf, and set out the photographs of her grandchildren, my bother and his wife, pictures of me and beautiful pictures of herself from her younger years.
'I don't like the dead,' she told me. 'I'd rather be in the company of the living.'"


 

Oxford American:  Writer's Thesaurus

Vagitus, meaning the cry of a newborn baby, would have been the perfect word for Mother's Day. In fact, while I was enjoying brunch at Filoli Gardens, I happened to hear a vagitus.  There is such a distinctive sound to a newborn's cry -- almost like the mewing of a kitten, but not quite.  And it certainly gives me a jolt back in time to those early, sleep-deprived days of motherhood.  The reaction is visceral, almost primal in the instinct to nurse that it brings on.  (Or maybe I'm just wired differently?)  I do find it interesting that this word shares a common root with a part of the female anatomy that the baby must pass through to enter the world.  Perhaps the creator of this word could have come up with something more akin to the actual sound instead of the anatomy -- infantilmewl? babywail?  Yikes!  Any wordsmiths out there have a suggestion?

Zadie Smith's "word note' in the Writer's Thesaurus for vagitus (found just below the word cry) has a nice touch of humor: 

"VAGITUS:  The cry of a newborn baby.  Something to add, possibly to that very short list questions that must be asked of someone who has just given birth.  There is never anything much to say, but you can at least lengthen the period of questions before the awkward silence.  Boy or girl?  How much did he weigh?  What color are his eyes?  How loud was his vagitus?"
 

A Pale View of Hills
by Kazuo Ishiguro
(Vintage, 1982)

Like many readers, I did not read Ishiguro's A Pale View of Hills until after "discovering" him through his novel, The Remains of the Day.  As I prepare a  review of his newly released Nocturnes:  Five Stories of Music and Nightfall, I felt a need to return to Ishiguro's early books to get my bearings on his artistry.  As I re-read A Pale of View of Hills, I was struck by how different Ishiguro and Ondaatje (another favorite author of mine) are, especially in their handling of the subject of lives shredded by World War II.  Ondaatje relies on imagery-laden scenes and spare dialogue to carry the burden of his characters' sadness.  Ishiguro's prose is as spare and clean as a room in a traditional Japanese home -- solid tatami floor, feather-light screens, warm and shadowy light.  Ondaatje's characters feel steeped in romance, even when they're in agony, while Ishiguro's characters fumble behind politeness and their fear keeps their agonies at bay; emotions are deep, but too frightening to face head on. 

A Pale View of Hills uses the narrative effect that captured a much wider audience in The Remains of the Day:  the narrator who's walking down memory lane and trying to sort things out, make excuses, find a way to forgive or fool himself once and for all. It doesn't surprise me that A Pale View of Hills was a quietly received book -- unfortunately, the Japanese author and setting probably kept many readers away.  However, it does not deserve to sink into obscurity.   Ishiguro deftly keeps the big setting of post-atomic bomb Nagasaki at bay, like a dreadful cloud hovering on the horizon, and only comes into sharper focus during a visit to the Peace Memorial near the end of the novel.  Instead, the novel concentrates on the small domestic moments of families torn asunder by devastation, families who are trying to assemble new lives.  A mother and 10-year old daughter move to a shabby cottage on the outskirts of a new apartment complex where they are befriended by a pregnant wife who welcomes a distraction from her husband's and father-in-law's insecurities and her anxieties about the upcoming birth of her first child. Unfortunately, the more she learns about this mother and daughter, the more unsettled she becomes.  This story unravels slowly and is narrated from the wife's future, where she is now living in a cottage in soggy England, and struggling to make sense of her twenty-something daughter's recent suicide; her second husband is dead, and her relationship with her younger daughter from that marriage is strained.  Not all the story's gaps are filled in -- like what became of her first husband, or how she met her second husband -- but that lends an authenticity to the novel's voice of reminiscence. This book is unsettling and wonderful and has aged quite nicely. 

Here's the review of A Pale View of Hills from the April 19, 1982 edition of The New Yorker -- spare on flowery praise, but firm in its approval, a fitting tribute. 

"A middle-aged Japanese woman named Etsuko, who survived the boming of Nagasaki (she lived on its outskirts) and moved some years later to rural England, finds her memories of life in Nagasaki's ruins reawakened when her older daughter, after years of severe depression, hangs herself, and her younger daughter comes out from London, after the funeral to comfort her.  Etsuko dreams, talks, and thinks about the months after the bomb dropped, when she established a shaky friendship with a haughty woman and her secretive child --wealthy refugees living temporarily nearby.  This web of memories features the child's nightmarish visions, which now haunt Etsuko, and the mother's indifference toward her child's welfare, which holds a clue to Etsuko's present sorrow.  A fine, strong novel (Kazuo Ishiguro's first); the plot's subtle pattern is the attentive reader's ample reward."

Who is Mark Twain?
by Mark Twain himself
Never Before Published!
(Harper Studio, 2009)

While I am a Twain aficionado, I'm by no means an expert on his works.  I feel this disclaimer is necessary because great Twain scholars are probably even now queuing up their full-scale reviews of this book.  While I can't help but admire his fiction, it is Twain's essays which I look to for inspiration and Who is Mark Twain? did not disappoint.  What I found especially interesting is that, according to Robert Hirst, General Editor of the Mark Twain Project (what a dream job that must be!), Twain wanted these works published.  It mattered not whether they were incomplete, inicindiary, or as, in the case of "Frank Fuller and My First New York Lecture," the roughest of drafts, Twain put them in his "box of Posthumous Stuff" to let the readers decide their worth.  Brave man!  Ahh, well, his opening essay, "Whenever I Am About to Publish a Book" (which I blogged about here) made it pretty clear he cared about readers and not critics.  Yes, I think that would make one a braver (and perhaps better?) writer.  How different is his perspective on posthumous works than that of Nabokov, who so feared death as the ultimate loss of control over his work (or so it seems) that he wished for his unfinished works to be destroyed. 

These essays are invaluable for the insight they give into Twain's writing process -- how he developed the essay's point of view by circling round things for a while, then settling like an eagle in its perch to declare what's wise or foolish.  Perhaps because I've just undergone some painful moments in the dental chair, I particularly enjoyed his essay on "Happy Memories of the Dental Chair."  Also, on this the day of another postage hike, "On Postage Rates on Authors' Manuscript" is a must-read.  (Thank god the world is switching to cheaper digital submissions, is all I can say).  But now, as I go back over the essays once again, I want to list what's special about each and every one of them, which tells me, this is a must-read for essay lovers, Twain lovers and writers one and all.  Take one more trip with Twain.  You won't be sorry. 
 

Not only am I going to break open a bottle of bubbly this weekend to celebrate 12 years of motherhood, I'll also be celebrating having a bit more of my work out there on the web.  This month at Open Letters Monthly, I have a review of Jakov LInd's Landscape in Concrete.  If you've not heard of Lind (which I hadn't before I received this book in the mail from Open Letter Books), check out this blog blurb first for a little background. 

Also, I was lucky to be able to write a cover story for Parenting on the Peninsula on one of my favorite local spots, Filoli. If you want to learn more about this National Trust property so you can add it to your list of places to visit next time you're in the Bay Area, you can find the article on pg. 12 here.

Happy Mother's Day! 

The Egyptologist
by Arthur Phillips
(Random House, 2005)

I made it to May without abandoning a book.  Odd timing.  It's been almost a year to the day since my last abandoned book -- Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh.  Unlike with Rushdie, I really hated to put The Egyptologist aside.  I kept urging myself forward, but the dread was so overwhelming whenever I picked it up, that I had to admit, it was over.  

Post Mortum:  I remember picking by The Egyptologist at Kepler's in 2005 and telling my husband, "Hey, I knew an Egyptologist!"  He gave me that look.  "No, really." The husband of my cubicle-buddy back in the 1980's (yes, they had cubicle's way back then)  was studying at Univ. of MD. to be an Egyptologist."   When my cubicle-buddy told me that I asked, "He studies Egypt?" "Ancient Egypt," she replied.  "Like hieroglyphics and stuff?" "Yup."  "Will he go on a dig?"  She looked pained at that question.  I didn't push.

I'm a great fan of books like The Egyptologist , such as the works of Andrea Barrett and AS Byatt -- that mixture of science, discovery, mystery, and especially the intricate narrative voices that bring you back to those times.  The Egypotologist captures none of that historical narrative voice.  The mystery set up in the early pages is soon squandered on backstory.  And the thinly-veiled and poorly-executed guise of epistolary narration fails miserably. (See The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society for a contemporary book that gets that form right).    I liked (not loved) Phillip's Prague and will continue onward to read Angelica and The Song is You.  I've not given up on Philipps as thoroughly as I have Rushdie. Afterall, it was only his second book and everyone's allowed a dud now and then. 

(I do still wonder if that U of MD Egyptology major ever managed to get to Egypt for a real dig. I hope so.  Sometimes, you gotta leave the grumpy wife and chase your dreams! )

Lamb in his Bosom
by Caroline Miller
(Avon, 1963)

I'm half-way through this impressive Pulitzer winner from 1934.  I can't help wondering if Gone with the Wind and it's huge technicolor of a movie is partly to blame for this book being forgotten.  But frankly, my dear, this book is so much better!  Mitchell meets Faulkner meets Laura Ingalls Wilder.  (Oooh.. hate that... way to NYT/Michiko.  Never mind.)  

This book has a baby birthin' scene that beats Gone with the Wind by a long shot.  Here we have a woman alone in a pre-civil war Georgia cabin whose husband has gone off to the Coast to get supplies and whose family, though only an ox-cart ride away, might as well be on the moon because she's gone into labor.  Not only does she have to feed her two toddler supper in the middle of her labor, she has to deal with a panther who gets past the guarding hounds.  There is a disorienting moment when, thanks to the Southern dialect, the reader might think she's being attacked by a painter and the writing tends to be overblown at times, but, truly, I'm humbled by this heroine and her life.  Shootin' a yankee and makin' a gown from curtains, is nothin' compared to what Cean (prononounced sea-ann) Smith goes through.  Here's a bit from the chilling birthin' episode:

"She lay, spent and half-asleep, cold under the piled cover, with her first man-child on her arm.  He would have no name until Lonzo should come and name him. 
Outside in the dark, locusts chirred with long, beating shrillness that deafened the ears; that sound has always made her feel the heat more when she noticed it; now she did not notice it.
Suddenly the hounds gowled, and the hair on their backs bristled high down the ridge of each lean spine.  So close that she could swear that it was just outside the door, Cean heard a painter scream, and another painter's hoarser scream answered the first.  It sounded like women's high, agonized crying.  The hounds bayed in dismay, and beat the earth to thundery dust going in pursuit of the painters' crying.  Cean's blood seemed to freeze with fear, so that she could not move.  The painters were after her new-born child and her.  Hadn't she heard her mother tell how the painters could smell childbirth blood for any number of miles?  And here were her other two children naked on the bed, and her only man-child still lying as he had lain yesterday and the day before, his chin and folded fists crowded on his breast, his little red legs crossed at the feet and drawn high on his body."