The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka ****

I've never heard the radio play by Dylan Thomas called Under Milkwood performed, though I always wanted to after I read it.  I got interested in Thomas when I read some of his short stories back when I was in college.  Sometimes they annoyed me & I couldn't finish them, but other times they were so right that they are singed into my memory.  One short story in particular I will remember forever, but I haven't been able to find it again.  I don't know where I read it but it's one of those quests that will define my life--where is that story?

The Buddha in the Attic reminds me of Under Milkwood because of the way it is written.  You get to hear the inner voices of a group of people, a community, what they're thinking & how they're living.  Thomas wrote of a Welsh fishing village, but Otsuka writes of the community of Japanese picture brides that came to the US after the turn of the century.  I know it sounds very different, but for some reason it was rather similar to me.

I can't imagine how brave & scared those women had to be, coming to a totally foreign land to marry men they'd never met, men that they only had pictures of & letters full of promises.  When they got to our shores many found that not only were their new husbands not the men in the pictures, but they were desperately poor.  These women who hoped for a better life across the ocean found themselves in just as much hardship as what they'd left.  And through this book their voices speak again, about the women that started laundry businesses with their husbands, or started farming rented land.  Or worked as maids for the rich ladies of San Francisco, or became prostitutes.  You hear them talk of how they learned to love their husbands, or never stopped hating them.  Of how they were worked almost to death, & had to claw their way up the ladder of success.  You hear them mourn the loss of children & grow weary at the birth of yet another. 

You get to become part of their community for a short while, just as you became part of the fabric of Milkwood for a short while too.  But unlike Dylan Thomas' fictional village, the story of the women of Japan who came to America is real.  And it comes to a screeching halt when their homes, stores, businesses & farms are suddenly empty & abandoned.  It ends in 1942. 

A very good book.  It left me haunted by voices.

All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy ***

I've always loved horses.  Watching them run in a horse race is one of my favorite things to do, though I've never seen a race live--just on TV.  I took a riding class in college for one of my PE credits & learned to ride English.
But I have to admit that I still sometimes get scared of how big they are.  I had a lot of trouble when I was younger being assertive with them, letting them know I was boss.  I haven't ridden one now for 20 years, so I don't know how I'd handle it.  I've changed a lot in the past 20 years, I might be more confident about being in charge.  Or I might be less.
John Grady Cole is the hero of All the Pretty Horses, and he has a great love of the animals.  He seems to be able to sense things about them that others can't, and he values them almost as much as he values people.  He's a very loyal young man with a firm sense of who he is.  And he's only 16 years old when he and his pal Lacy Rawlins decide to head south into Mexico to seek their fortunes.  John Grady has nothing to lose--the ranch he grew up on was owned by his maternal grandfather.  When his grandpa dies the ownership went to his mother, who is a want-to-be actress who hates living on the ranch.  His parents are estranged, especially after his father was presumed dead during WWII while a POW in the South Pacific.  And so the ranch will be sold.  And everything that's important for John Grady will be gone.
This story of the boys' misadventures in Mexico has some humorous moments, especially whenever Rawlins is involved.  You can just hear these boys talking to each other in their Texas drawls, Rawlins wearing his new boots, breaking some horses.
But mostly the story is about the brutality of our southern neighbor.  The absolute and irrevocable justice of life, the common story of wrongful death.  I wish I could say Mexico has changed a lot since the 1950's, the setting for this book.  But as many of us know, the violence of Mexico lives on, and tries to spread over the border into the US constantly and successfully.
Quite a few years ago this book was the choice for the Reader's Review on the Diahn Rehm Show on NPR.  I hadn't read it yet, but I remember one of the readers mentioning that the profound reasoning and deep introspection of John Grady Cole just didn't fit with any 16 year old boy he'd ever met.  I have to agree.  I don't understand why the two main heroes weren't portrayed just a few years older, but Cormac McCarthy may have his reasoning.  I know this is the first of three books about this part of the country at this time, called collectively The Border Trilogy.
Overall I thought some of the imagery of the book both beautiful and haunting.  It was an upsetting book in it's violence, but not in it's presence.  It's hard for me to explain, but maybe it's because of it's unfairness.  I think as I get older I've become less of a realist and more shallow in some ways--I just want to read something where everyone is OK in the end.
This was a beautifully written book, but I don't see myself reading the other two books in the trilogy.  I just wasn't able to take the reins of this book and control it--in the end it controlled me and got me down.

The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry ****

I think pretty much everyone who speaks English knows the saying, "Better late than never!"  I feel that lately it's become the best description of everything I do.  Not sure why I've gotten into this mode, but I can't seem to get anything much done in a reasonable amount of time.  I hope the above saying is true, because I'm awfully late in reviewing this book!

I think that same old adage could be used in conjunction with this book.  Is it better to find something important out eventually?  Better to know it in the end than to have never known it at all?

Roseanne McNulty is an ancient woman living in a mental health institution in County Sligo, Ireland.  No one is quite sure when she became a patient there, but the head psychiatrist is in charge of determining which patients are able to go back into society as the old building is being torn down.  Roseanne, unbeknownst to anyone else, is quietly writing down her memories & hiding them under the floorboards of her room.  Meanwhile, the psychiatrist is finding out her "official" history.  Those two differing accounts of an abused life intersect & diverge & we're left with a truth that is frightening & noble. 

One of the main themes of the book is the way that the Catholic church was able to rewrite peoples' lives at will, to either raise them up or cast them down.  Being cast down due to nothing more than being beautiful, being raised up despite committing injustices against others.

I liked Roseanne's character for a selfish reason--in many ways, she did nothing remarkable in her life.  She simply loved & survived.  I find this very refreshing because I think most of us are living rather unremarkable lives ourselves.  And in this book Sebastian Barry makes that a beautiful poetry.  She didn't single-handedly defeat the Catholic church.  She didn't do anything extraordinary.  But then again, she did.  She didn't give up.
Roseanne's story is unearthed very late, but you could definitely argue that it was better then never.  As the psychiatrist follows a very old trail, you begin to realize that those bread crumbs left behind to guide us back to where we came from are still worth following.  They might not form a straight line, but enough may still be there to find the way.
A beautiful & lyrical book.  I highly recommend this to others.

The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje ***

How many times have you seen a movie of a novel before you read it?  I couldn't tell you the number I personally have seen, but The English Patient is one of those.  I first saw it when it was released in theatres back in the spring of 1997.  My husband and I saw it at the Battlefield Mall Cinema in Springfield, Missouri.  I loved the movie almost instantly--the romantic story line, the amazingly beautiful cinematography, and of course Ralph Fiennes.  I like Ralph.  A lot.

So here is the series of events that caused me to read the book 14 years after seeing the movie:  my husband finds the book laying in the hall of the high school he teaches at two years ago; he keeps it in his room and asks around to see who lost it but no one claims it; he puts it in the closet in his classroom and forgets it; about 10 days ago I'm talking with our foreign exchange student about movies we love and I mention it; Dog remembers he has the book at school and says he'll bring it home; he brings it home a couple days later after we both forget about it; I read it.  Not so dramatic, but there are so many turn along the way that might have led me to never reading it.

So, now that I've read it the question is what do I think of it.  And I'd have to say I liked the movie more.  Don't get me wrong, Michael Ondaatje's writing is beautiful and poetic.  He is a poet as well as a novelist, so this makes a great deal of sense.  A poet can convey emotion very succinctly--just a few seemingly unrelated words can be strung together and make a portrait of feeling that you can feel to your core.  But I guess I'm just a very pragmatic, practical person.  For me, there has to be a good reason for the emotion.  Why would someone shoot themselves?  To me you'd need a pretty darn good reason.  Why would someone turn their back on love when both of them desperately need it?  Again, I crave a solid reason.  And in the book, but not in the movie, for me the reasons just didn't seem real. 

Dog and I watched the movie again after I finished the book and it just confirmed my feelings about it.  I love the movie, and I think the characters from the book are carried over very well into the movie.  But I feel more comfortable with the motivations of the movie characters.

If you've neither seen the movie or read the book, I suggest reading the book first.  Then watch the movie and tell me what you think.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer & Annie Barrows ****

I kinda like epistolary novels, one's that are written in the form of letters exchanged between the characters. I read a great one once, Fair and Tender Ladies, that I highly recommend. I also recommend this one.

Not many people in England are very aware of the Nazi occupation of the Channel Islands, let alone Americans. But it was the closest Hitler got to conquering the British Isles, and it's still amazing to think how close he came. From 1940 to 1945 the Channel Islands were occupied and fortified by German military forces, and the citizens of the islands were subjected to the same atrocities as other occupied territories.

The authors of this book lovingly spin a tale from letters exchanged between a young author in London and the remains of a small resistance group in Guernsey. They didn't resist overtly, but rather by gathering and finding comfort in each others' company and in their love of books, they were able to survive the war.

I believe that we in the US just can't grasp fully what it was like for Europe during WWI and WWII--we haven't been invaded, had bombs dropped on us on a daily basis, or had to deal with the kind of deprivation that was experienced on the continent and adjacent British Isles. The fact that a potato peel pie could be a delicacy to these starving people (the peels made the crust, the mashed part was the insides) is something I surely hope we never have to face here.

I hope you give this page-turner a try!

********************

A special thanks goes out to my friend Wendy from high school, who suggested this book to me, and my Aunt Patt who seconded her idea! Give me more!

Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer ***

I've been lax. Very lax. It's not that I haven't been reading, heavens no! It's that I haven't been blogging. Now why that is is a multi-faceted, complex, & difficult to describe reason. But I'll take a whack at putting that reason into words: I've been busy. And that will just have to do as far as excuses go.

Now, on to the book. I had seen this movie a couple years ago only because it had Eugene Hutz in it, & I love Gogol Bordello. Not only did Eugene give a great performance, but so did Elijah Wood & Boris Leskin. I highly recommend the movie.

The book was another story (no pun intended). It started out in a hilarious manner as a letter written by Alex, a young Ukrainian man, to Jonathan Safran Foer. You see, JSF is a character in his own book. And while I warmed up to his character in the movie, I grew to dislike JSF in the book. I think this is to be expected since we see Alex improve his English but also grow & change during the course of telling the story of why JSF came to the Ukraine. As Alex learns, he learns to dislike JSF also.

Why is JSF there? To find the woman, Augustine, who saved his grandfather from a Nazi death squad. All he has is an old picture to go by, & the name of the town he's looking for. But how can you find a Jewish town 50 years after the Holocaust?

The book has a lot of very confusing story lines that I just frankly didn't understand. I don't know why the story of Brod was part of this book, it didn't seem to advance the plot at all. And I've got to say I've never been a big fan of stream of consciousness, so when I ran into a few pages of it I had to just put on a determined grin & slog through it.

Overall this is one of those rare books that was, in my opinion, much better as a movie. It made more sense & it had a much bigger impact. I suggest renting the movie & enjoying Eugene & the fellas do a fine job of making pain, beauty, & collecting things illuminated.

The Postmistress by Sarah Blake ***

This is one of those books that you finally get to the end of and you're left wondering many many things about it. Like, why?

It takes place in 1940-1941 before the US had joined up for WWII. The action happens on the home front and over in Europe, following two stories that converge in the end. The premise is that the postmaster of a small town on the tip of Cape Cod decides to buck her own principles and not deliver a letter to a woman who's husband is in London helping out during the Blitz. Now, my big Why? in this book is why did this woman's husband go over there? He's a doctor, he's lost his first patient, and he can't take it anymore. So he goes over to help in London. But he loves his wife very much and knows that he leaves her utterly alone when he's gone. I was mad at this guy from the get go. I guess it just didn't make enough sense to me that he'd leave her and that made any sympathy I had for him go right out the window.

Alright, meanwhile there's an American lady radio reporter over in London too, reporting on the Blitz. Her impassioned reporting is partly why the doctor went over there. She soon leaves London, though, to go to continental Europe and report on the plight of the Jews there. She makes voice recordings (the technology wasn't really quite there yet in reality) of the people she meets fleeing for Spain and Portugal, realizing that many of them would soon be dead. This was a pretty neat part of the book, and devastating in its description of children, older men, pregnant women, all of them desperate to get out of the hell that Europe had become for them.

Overall, this book is good. But the hard part for me was the slowness of the action, especially at the end. I kept wanting to yell at the characters to just get on with it. The opening of the book is odd too, since I don't really see where it was necessary at all for the story.

I'll say this--if you like books about the people caught up in WWII, this one will at least be up your alley.

Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky *****

Every once in a while, I will read a book that has a meaning of more than just the words that are written on its pages. This book in two parts, Suite Francaise, is a work of fiction. But the story behind its author has made it even more than the sum of its parts.

In the first part of the book, it's June of 1940, & the Nazis are invading France. The people of Paris are abandoning everything & racing in a frenzy to leave the city behind to what they assume will be its utter destruction. All classes of people are thrown together, much to their dismay, in this mass exodus. The rich, the famous, the struggling, the poor, all of them have the same kinds of experiences in the countryside surrounding Paris.

In the second part, Dolce, a small French village is subjected to the occupying forces. Nazi soldiers are housed in spare bedrooms, the community's horses are all bought for the war. The townspeople make money off the Germans, & the young people gradually find themselves in relationships with the enemy that they never thought they were capable of. As the new Eastern Front opens up with Russia, the book suddenly ends.

My above descriptions are of the book itself. What makes this more than it is, is the fate of the author.

Irene Nemirovsky was doubly damned, being not only Russian but Jewish. To the Nazis, Communists were almost as bad as Jews, & they pretty much assumed anyone from Russia was pro-Communist. Though Nemirovsky lived her adult life in France, she wasn't a citizen. When Paris fell she fled, like the characters from her book, into the countryside with her husband & daughters. There they thought they were safe, even as Irene started writing her new novel. Suite Francaise was going to be her masterpiece--her own War & Peace. She envisioned it in 5 distinct parts, like an orchestral symphony. She was destined to only get the first 2 parts done.

In July of 1942, she was arrested & sent to a concentration camp in France. From there she wrote 2 last letters to her family. Then she was put on a train east. To Auschwitz. She didn't last long there & died on August 17, without her family's knowledge. Desperate to find his wife, her husband, who was also a Russian Jew, frantically telegraphed & wrote to everyone he could think of who could help. It was to no avail, & 2 months later he was deported also. He was sent to the gas chambers immediately upon arrival.

At this time, Nemirovsky's daughters were 5 & 10 years old. A family friend immediately removed the yellow stars off all their clothing & hid the children in several different places for the rest of the war. They were continually hunted by the French police, who apparently had nothing better to do, but luckily they were never caught.

Denise, the older daughter, kept her mother's leather bound notebook with her all through the war & after. She couldn't bring herself to read what was written within, but kept it simply as a memento. Then, in the early 1970's, she decided to donate it to a French collection of war writings. Looking at her mother's writing for the first time, she was surprised to find not just a journal as she always suspected, but also a book. It was finally published in 2004.

That is the story of Suite Francaise. I could go on & on about the book & the emotions it has stirred up in me. Anger, mostly. The waste, the terrible waste of human life & genius because of the Holocaust. I wanted so very much to read the end of this book--all 5 parts. I know it would have been the masterpiece she envisioned. Instead, her own life became the ending of her book.

Pictures at an Exhibition by Sara Houghteling ***

The premise of this book is great: a Jewish art dealer in Paris before the Nazi's march in, flees the city in advance of the invasion, returns to Paris after it's liberation to find that not only is his gallery & home destroyed, all of his art work is gone. The story follows his son, Max, as he tries to find their art in order to finally gain approval from his father. I like that the subject of disability does arise (where doesn't it arise, once you're aware of it?), but overall it just didn't click with me. Like I said, the idea is compelling. But the characters just don't come across as memorable. There is a lot of fact wrapped up in this novel, which makes me want to read one of the author's sources, The Rape of Europa . All in all, it wasn't a bad book. I just didn't find it to be the kind of book that I will think about later.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon ****

I don't know much about comic books since I haven't read one in about 30 years. I used to go through piles of them at my grandma's house in St. John when I was a kid--I'm guessing they were ones my older cousins had discarded. A lot of them were Disney ones, about Donald Duck, his nephews, & his Uncle Scrooge McDuck. There was one great one of Macbeth--yeah, Shakespeare. I'll always have the image in my mind of Lady Macbeth scrubbing her hand & saying, "Out out, damn spot!" that was imprinted there from that comic book.
More recently, the closest I've gotten to comics is reading Maus by Art Spiegelman. It's Spiegelman's attempt to wrap his mind around the experiences of his father & mother, who lived through the Holocaust but lost their only child (at the time) to it. He portrays Jews at mice, Germans as cats, Poles as pigs, & Americans as dogs. It is an amazing book, & he wrote a sequel also. The imagery is stark & graphic, the subject difficult but necessary.
Kavalier & Clay was obviously influenced by Maus, but it was mostly influenced by Jack Kirby, who the author acknowledges at the end of the book. It's about the hey-day of comic books, right before & during WWII. Two cousins, Josef Kavalier & Sammy Clay, collaborate on a new superhero--the Escapist. It proves to be monstrously successful, but both cousins have demons they are trying to escape from themselves.
For Joe, it's Nazi Europe. He is desperate to get his family to America, but fate is making it very difficult to do so.
For Sammy, it's himself. Society doesn't make it acceptable to by gay in the 1940's, & Sammy doesn't want to be on display.
This is a great book. I highly recommend it. The only reason I didn't give it 5 stars is because of the ending. It's not a disappointing ending, it's just kinda abrupt. But it is good. Very good.

Mudbound by Hillary Jordan ****

I found this book on a list from NPR of recommended first books from new authors. I was having a heck of a time finding one of them at my local library, & it just happened that they had this one.
I have to say up front that I have no desire to go to Mississippi--it just sounds hot, humid, poor, racist, & just plain foul. I know that's not what the state really is (I know there are probably even more people out there that have an even worse view of Missouri, maybe deservedly), but I've got to say that this book doesn't help. Alright, it takes place in 1946, so it's not like things were very progressive back then. But I think the reason that this book makes me feel that way about Mississippi is because the main character, Laura, feels that way. She's from Memphis & when her husband, Henry, uproots her from her large extended family & plops her down on a muddy Mississippi farm she's understandably upset. The change in her scenery makes her act in ways she never thought herself capable of, both positive & negative.
The character of Ronsel is wonderful too, you just want him to get the hell out of there & go somewhere he can grow & expand & fill up the space made by his potential. Jamie is the imperfect person that always is there, reminding us of our failings & weaknesses. And of course there's Pappy--you gotta hate him.
I suggest you give this one a try.

The Plot Against America by Philip Roth ***

The idea for this book had a lot of promise: what if, instead of Roosevelt winning his third term as president in 1940, Lindbergh had run against him & won instead? As many people may or may not know, Lindbergh thought Hitler was pretty neat & that the Jews were running the world. So what would the US have looked like if he'd been in charge?

Like I said, sounds like a neat idea, especially when it's written in the first person as a memoir of...Philip Roth! Roth grew up in New Jersey during WWII in a predominantly Jewish town with his parents & older brother. So he just flips everything on it's head when he acts as though he's writing his autobiography from the early war years. Except in his book, we don't go to war with the Axis in December of 1941, since there is no Pearl Harbor. This is because Lindbergh had signed a treaty with Japan earlier in that year.

But what starts out great & hard to put down becomes mired, for me, in symbolism. Had it been a little more straightforward, I might have enjoyed this book more. But by the end I was just glad it was over. I'd have to say it was very disappointing that way: started with a bang & ended with a groan of relief.

Inferno by Keith Lowe *****

Yes, another 5 star book. Honestly, I've just been on a lucky streak lately! This is one of Dog's books, I had run out of reading material one night & he said he was going to pick some books out for me. This is the one I chose.

It's about the almost total destruction of the city of Hamburg during the course of 1 week in late July/early August 1943. Four night bombing raids by RAF bombers & two by American day bombers pretty much finished off the city. You may have heard of the fire storm the RAF started on their second raid of July 27--it was of almost unspeakable power & horror. The descriptions of what some of the people of Hamburg went through & saw are chilling. I will always remember a particular scene: fleeing their bomb shelter because they realized they would be roasted alive or die of smoke inhalation if they stayed, a young family reached the street & saw the road burning, the trees burning, & horses from a local business running by, burning. Everything was on fire. Everything. Even bricks were incinerated in the high heat, & winds that could pick you up & carry you into the fire were created by the hideously high heat & lack of humidity.

I don't generally like non-fiction, I find it dry & boring. This was nothing of the sort, & it isn't because of the events that the author was describing--it was because of his ability as an author. This was Keith Lowe's first non-fiction book after writing two successful novels, & his talent is a wonderful thing to behold. He somehow is able to describe both sides of this conflict, interviewing survivors of the bombing & the men who did the bombing, with a knack for getting you to see how each person was part of an inevitable cog in history. You can blame each side for what happened, but you're left just feeling the burden of being human. Why are we this way? I don't know, & Keith Lowe doesn't either, but I'm left with the words NEVER AGAIN stamped in my mind.

Are we doing enough in the here & now to keep this from happening again? Or is it already happening as we speak?

A Thread of Grace by Mary Doria Russell *****

This book was the first in the Chewing the Fat book discussion group. I'm not sure if I have a link to it on this page, but Chewing the Fat is a blog that deals with disabilities of all kinds, & it's written by a wonderful man named Dave Hingsburger. He's worked all his adult life with people with developmental disabilities, & has now recently become disabled himself due to illness & mobility issues. I went to see a conference of his in April of 2007 & I have to say, it changed my life. That's saying a lot, I know, but when I look back I can say with certainty now that it did. My awareness of the issues faced by people with disabilities & my feeling that I have to join their fight for equality & respect is all a direct result of those 2 days in April, hearing him speak with humor & force.

The books discussed on Chewing the Fat will always have characters with disabilities in them, but it's truly amazing to me how many many books that encompasses. A Thread of Grace is one of those books that you don't ever realize has any disabled characters in it at all until you're done & you get to take a breath & reflect on it. There is one pivotal scene that deals with it head on, but for the rest of the novel it is there, yet hidden. And you realize that it's because we're all disabled. You see that clearly, & you understand that just because no one can see your weaknesses & challenges, you still have them. And just because you can see others' obvious ones, it doesn't mean that behind that they are perhaps stronger in areas that you have a deficit in .

The book takes place in Italy near the end of WWII, when Jewish refugees crawled over the mountains to get to what they hoped would be the safe haven of Italy only to find that the German army had come in right behind them & taken over. I honestly can't recommend this book enough--it's going to be one of those ones that I will reference in my mind for a long time, & the characters will be there too with a smirk, making me think WWRD? (What Would Renzo Do?)

Give it a read--you won't regret it.