All About Books

MAY

*As Elizabeth Strout (“Olive Kitteridge”) says on the back cover, “As Close to Us as Breathing,” by Elizabeth Poliner, is “a lovely, lovely book.” Exactly what I felt.  In 1948, a small part of the Woodmont, Connecticut, shoreline, affectionately named “Bagel Beach,” has long been a summer destination for Jewish families.  Each year sisters Ada, Vivie and Bec and their children assemble there at their beloved family cottage, and freedom reigns during the week as they evolve in their relationships with each other and with their families until their weekend-only husbands arrive each Friday in time for the strictly organized Sabbath meal.  Then a terrible accident occurs on the sisters’ watch, which leads to a lifetime of atonement for this close-knit clan.  The narrator of the story is Ada’s daughter, Molly, who was twelve at the time of the accident, and we feel keenly the complex emotions and agonizing decisions each family member faces as they attempt to move through the ensuing decades.  This character-driven novel is about responsibility to one’s family and religion, set at a time and in a culture that is insulated, rigidly segregated and deeply patriarchal.  The author portrays the sisters, in particular, so vividly that we feel a part of the life they cherish and share their grievous emotional loss when it comes to an end.

*If you are a fan of Trevor Noah’s show, I know you will enjoy his deeply personal “Born a Crime:  Stories From a South African Childhood,“ as it is so thoroughly in his voice (thanks to Kathleen Davis for recommending it).   The criminal act he refers to is his birth, as he was born to a black Xhosa mother and a white Swiss father at a time under apartheid when such a union was punishable by five years in prison.  As a result, he was kept indoors for the earliest years of his life to keep the government from stealing him away.  His mother, who gave him unconditional love and to whom he dedicates this book, made sure English was his first language because “if you’re black in South Africa, speaking English is the one thing that can give you a leg up.” He also became a “chameleon,” learning other African languages to blend in in school and on the streets. Once liberated from apartheid he became a prankster, and by high school an enterprising businessman.  Written with a mixture of anger and wry humor, this book is a harrowing account of growing up mixed-race in South Africa, both during and after apartheid, as well as a love letter to his fiercely religious, fearless mother, a woman determined to save her son from the cycle of poverty, violence and abuse she faced in her own life.  The memoir ends as Noah’s career as a comedian begins, and leaves us eager to know how he reached the prominence he enjoys today.  His next book, I hope. (J)

*“Couple Mechanics,” by Nelly Alard, reeled me right in, which can happen when you are dropped into the middle of the emotional complexities of a marriage.  Juliette and Olivier have two young children and the busy lives of a typical Parisian couple, but Juliette is shattered when Olivier confesses to having an affair.  As she tries to figure out how to navigate these newly treacherous waters, this suspenseful and compulsively readable story becomes addictive, and I had trouble putting it down.  As the author says, “Every relationship forces couples to decide to love, to keep on loving, or to stop loving.”  Neither the couple nor the reader can foretell what the outcome will be, and the ending will surprise you.

*It’s hard to beat good historical fiction for a compelling blend of entertainment and information, and “Last Days of Night,” by Graham Moore, certainly fills that bill.  In New York in 1888, there are still gas lamps, but the person who controls the miracle of electric light will make history as well as a great fortune.  A young lawyer just out of Columbia Law School, Paul Cravath, takes on what seems like an impossible case.  His client, George Westinghouse, has been sued by Thomas Edison over a billion-dollar question:  Who invented the light bulb and holds the right to power the country?   Edison is a wily, dangerous opponent with vast resources at his disposal and compulsion to win at all costs, a trait Cravath shares.  Cravath crosses paths with Nikola Tesla, an eccentric, brilliant inventor who may hold the key to defeating Edison, and with his help and that of Agnes Huntington, a beautiful opera singer with many skills, takes on this challenging case with its tense twists and turns and surprising revelations.  This book reads like a technological thriller, and both Jack and I loved it.  (J)

*Another gripping book of historical fiction is “Flight of Dreams,” by Ariel Lawhon, which vividly brings to life the 1937 fateful voyage of the Hindenburg and its 97 passengers.  The author creates an intimate portrait of the real people on board, based on her research into their lives.  While the three-day flight was described as “uneventful,” Lawhon doesn’t believe that, feeling you can’t place that many people in such a small space for any length of time and not have tension brewing beneath the surface.  She was determined to use the real people who were on that last flight, and not change their fate – if they survived in real life, they survived in this novel, and if they died in real life they died in the novel.  She also researched zeppelins, so we learn a lot about airship travel.  No one knows what truly occurred on board or what created the spark that that caused the Hindenburg to explode and burn in 34 seconds, so Lawhon created a theory, taking the known disparate details and weaving them together to bring the people and their journey to life.  This book is superb. (J)

*When my daughter Cynthia and I saw the musical “Les Miserables” in New York shortly after it opened, I was blown away,  and have been a fan ever since.  Sad to say, I have never read Victor Hugo’s “Les Miserables,” so was drawn to “The Novel of the Century:  The Extraordinary Adventure of Les Miserables,” by David Bellos, a captivating biography of that 1862 classic of world literature.  Ballos tells the extraordinary story of how Hugo managed to write his novel of the downtrodden despite a revolution, a coup d’etat and political exile, and how he pulled off a pathbreaking deal to get it published.  His approach to the “social question” would see freedom of speech, freedom of expression, freedom of belief, penal reform, full employment, pacifism and political union (interestingly, to a great extent the founding principles of today’s European Union).  Many of the measures he espoused have been put into practice by governments of the left and right over the last 150 years.  According to the author, we should not underestimate the degree to which “Les Miserables” encouraged and maybe even accelerated the improvement of society.  In terms of reading the book, apparently in its almost 1500 pages there are 365 chapters, many of them short, so one way of approaching it is to read a chapter a day.  I’m thinking about it.  In the meantime, I thought this book was terrific.

Marie Olmstead recommended “Midnight in Broad Daylight:  A Japanese American Family Caught Between Two Worlds,” by  Pamela Rotner Sakamoto, the true story of a Japanese American family that found itself on opposite sides during World War II.  After their father’s death, the Fukuhara children, all born and raised in the Seattle area, moved with their mother back to Hiroshima.  Eager to return to America, Harry Fukuhara and his sister, Mary, came back  in the late 1930s. Then came Pearl Harbor and their assignment to an internment camp, where Harry volunteered to serve his country as a translator.  Meanwhile, back in Hiroshima, their brothers, Frank and Pierce, became soldiers in the Imperial Japanese Army.  Harry became one of the finest bilingual interpreters in the U. S. Army, island hopping across the Pacific, but before the brothers would have to face each other as enemies, the U. S. detonated the atomic bomb over Hiroshima.  Told from alternating American and Japanese perspectives, this is a personal and deeply moving story of both of those fighting and those trying to maintain the home front in Hiroshima, the latter something I have not read about before.  The author has done meticulous research, in a project championed by both Harry and Frank Fukuhara, and you will come to intimately know and admire this resilient family as they deal with racism and xenophobia as well as being torn apart by war.

In “Liberty Street,” by Dianne Warren, Frances Moon and Ian, her partner of twenty years, are stopped in traffic for a funeral near the churchyard of a small Irish town when she is surprised to find herself describing aloud to him a long-suppressed memory.  As a result, the next morning he has left her.  Not sure what to do, she decides to head for her family’s quiet farm in Elliot, the small town in western Canada where she grew up.  The “snows and snows” of winter and vast, hot, vacant plains of summer in Saskatchewan are beautifully conveyed as we start working backwards into Frances’ past.  Growing up, she never really fit in, driven by a lack of ambition for her own life and rebelling against her mother’s goals for her of education and social elevation and never having babies, the latter the only subject on which they seemed to agree.  Frances rebelled in all the irritating ways only teenagers can, until I actually felt myself sharing her mother’s frustrations. This is a book about leaving and returning and the insular culture of small rural communities, well-written but with an unsatisfying ending that seemed to come too suddenly.

The Israeli author Amos Oz has been publishing fiction and non-fiction since the 1960s, making it clear he has always supported a two-state solution in the Middle East, no matter the government’s policies.  In “Judas,” set in Jerusalem in 1959, Shmuel Ash, a biblical scholar whose parents are unable to continue funding his studies, including his unfinished thesis on the motivations of Judas, finds work as a caregiver for a brilliant but cantankerous old man named Gershom Wald, who does not want the death of his only son in an Israeli military action to have been in vain.  Also in the household is the mysterious Atalia Abravanel, the daughter of a prominent opponent of Israel’s statehood who came to be considered a traitor.   Schmuel is entranced by her, but she keeps him at a distance.  This multi-layered book, with its complicated relationships, includes observations on Shmuel’s abandoned thesis as well as what Shmuel expresses as the real existential challenges facing the State of Israel: “how to turn a hater into a lover, a fanatic into a moderate, an avenger into a friend.”  Reflecting Oz’s ideas, he says Israel’s power can only prevent its annihilation, not settle anything or solve anything.  It can only stave off disaster for a while.  This is a brilliant novel of ideas, not plot, and it will stay with you.

If you like original, sophisticated and often hilarious satire, “Mister Monkey,” by Francine Prose, is the book for you. “Mister Monkey,” a children’s musical about an orphan chimpanzee who has been adopted by a family in New York, has survived far past its prime, and while audiences seem to enjoy it, the actors in this off-off-off-off Broadway screwball comedy know it is dreadful and are humiliated to be a part of it.  The narrative perspective passes from one character in this disparate group to the next, child to grandfather, actor to author to audience member’s kindergarten teacher, all connected by a performance of the play during which a little boy is heard to loudly whisper, “Grandpa, are you interested in this?”  The chimp is played by Adam, a lonely, sullen 12-year-old kid with an unruly erection and a fear of climate change, in a costume sewn by his “asthmatic old hippie” mom from a brown chenille bedspread.  I won’t summarize the other characters, as that would reduce the great fun you’ll have in discovering them for yourself.  This is devastating satire, but Prose shows sympathy for and empathy with every character.  She has created a story that is funny and poignant and clever and deep, and I’m going to read more of her work.

Mysteries:  S. D. Sykes says that as a writer of crime thrillers she has always had a passion for the Middle Ages, more specifically the years between 1348 and 1381, which bookend the Black Death and the failed Peasants’ Revolt.  In “Plague Land,” Oswald de Lacy, who had been sent to a monastery ten years before at the age of seven, is brought back to be the Lord of Somerhill Manor after his father and two older brothers are killed by the plague.  He has no experience in running an estate, but before he can do anything he is confronted by the shocking death of a young woman, which the ambitious village priest claims was caused by demonic dog-headed men.  Oswald, a self-doubter who is not a natural leader, knows this is nonsense, but his attempt to prove it by finding the real murderer leads him into political intrigue, family secrets, and any number of plot twists.  I so enjoyed Sykes’ second book, “The Butcher Bird,” (reviewed earlier), that I made a point of reading this first one, as I find daily life in this very dark period of history fascinating, especially when a crime is thrown in. In “Rather Be the Devil,” by Ian Rankin, set in Edinburgh, now-retired Inspector Rebus just can’t let go of an unsolved case.  When he starts asking questions about a long-forgotten crime, the murder of a glamorous woman at a luxurious hotel forty years before, a fresh body turns up, and his inquiries reunite him with his old pals, Siobhan Clarke and Malcolm Fox, whom we know well from earlier novels. The notorious crime boss “Big Ger” Cafferty doesn’t seem to be fully retired either.  As the mysteries of the past and present begin to connect, I found the plot and a number of somewhat insignificant new characters a bit confusing, but Rankin is a fine writer, and the clever dialogue between him and his old friends makes the loyal reader feel a part of the gang as well.  I am drawn to Scandinavian crime writers, among them Norway’s Karin Fossum, and am seldom disappointed.  In “Hell Fire,” on an oppressively hot summer day, Inspector Konrad Sejer finds a woman and a young boy dead in a pool of blood in a dank trailer.  With no sign of robbery, the motivation for the crime is mysterious.  In a parallel story, another mother navigates life with her adult son, who has special needs.  As Sejer searches for the truth about the killings, the two stories sadly intertwine, and we learn what can drive a person to commit a seemingly senseless and horrific crime.   Rennie Airth’s John Madden mysteries are always a pleasure to read.  In “The Death of Kings,” a beautiful actress is murdered in 1938 on the Kent estate of Sir Jack Jessup, a close friend of the Prince of Wales.  The arrest of an ex-convict named Norris and his confession and execution swiftly bring the case to a close.  Now, in 1949, a jade necklace known to be similar to one worn by the actress has surfaced, raising the question – was Norris really guilty?   Although retired from Scotland Yard, John Madden is persuaded to investigate the case afresh.  There’s an interesting cast of characters in this police procedural, a nicely complex plot and, what we mystery readers always want, an ending with a surprising twist.  I’ve never read anything quite like “Behind Her Eyes,” by Sarah Pinborough, which is a good thing, as my life came to a halt while I turned one page after another, desperate to know what was actually happening and how it could possibly turn out.  A quote on the book’s cover says, “This is the kind of novel that takes over your life” – exactly!  Louise is a single mom who works as a secretary.  On a rare night out she meets a man in a bar.  Sparks fly, they kiss, he says he has to go.  The next day at work she meets her new married boss, David.  Guess  who?  Then Louise bumps into Adele, who says she’s new in town and needs a friend, and who happens to be David’s wife.  Louise doesn’t tell David about her friendship with Adele or Adele about the affair she begins with David.  To others, David and Adele look like a perfect couple, but why is David so controlling?  And why is Adele so scared of him?  Louise realizes, as do we, that something is very wrong in this marriage, but we don’t find out what until the totally startling and deeply disturbing ending.   I’m still reeling.   Because we so enjoyed our trip to Iceland with the Drews, I respond to stories set there that evoke the snow and the cold and the winter darkness (not the season we were there).  In ”Snowblind,” by Ragnar Jonasson, Ari Thor is a rookie policeman on his first posting in the small northern town of Siglufjordur, far from his girlfriend in Reykjavik. He has been assured that nothing much happens during the winter, but then the town’s most respected elder dies after a suspicious tumble down a flight of stairs and a young woman is found lying half naked in the snow, bleeding and unconscious. An avalanche in the nearby mountains cuts off the only road to town, trapping the assailant but forcing the small police force to rely strictly on its own limited resources to solve the crimes.  I found this a chatty, pleasant read, sort of mystery light, and, as always, I appreciated the map. (J)