Kim, Rudyard Kipling

Edwin Lord Weeks, An Open-Air Restaurant, Lahore, 1889

(March 30) Enjoyed this book so, so much, and was totally surprised by this.

I somehow got away with never reading any Kipling till now, but you can’t help knowing who he was and what his most famous books were about. I was put off by an impression that Kipling would be sentimental and imperialist... and maybe too juvenile. But Kim was being discussed on BookCel and sounded interesting... and was easy to get... so.

I picked it up ...and was not able to put it down. There are maybe the slightest bits of sentimentality, imperialism and boys'-adventure-taleism to it, but it is not juvenile at all... and the reading experience is so rich.

First, Kim is utterly adorable and it feels like he would be no matter where or when he grew up. But, second, he is in India, which Kipling paints as this phantasmagoria, this kaleidoscope, this panorama, this feast! of vivid sights, sounds, smells, tastes and feelings, overflowing with culture and history... and drama and comedy... where people love their loved ones deeply but hide it behind amusing jokes and cheeky teasing... (A Fine Balance and A Suitable Boy do this so well, too)... it’s very endearing.

Basically, a great novel, and now I get why K. is so revered.

All the Living, C.E. Morgan

Matt Schwartz, Girl With Piano, 2008?

(March 22) Thought I got the recommendation for this from Decorno, but now I can’t find any reference to it on her blog. It was a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice, one of the National Book Foundation's 5 Best Writers Under 35, and a finalist for the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for a distinguished book of fiction, and it won third place in Fiction for the Barnes & Noble Discover Award... so these may be reasons she recommended it.

I liked it a lot. It reminded me of Cool Water (backroads small lives) and Gilead (backroads community plus preachers plus American) and maybe a little Edgar Sawtelle (the wonders and beauties of farm life)... and it was so slow to start, and then over too fast. But Aloma’s choice was kind of riveting and it was never a gimme about how it would end... so that was very satisfying.

Symbolism is very, very strong -- in the weather, the scenery, the two houses, and on and on. Really sympathize with Aloma, even though she is a bit dissociated, as is Orren. They have good reasons to be.

The Zookeeper’s Wife: A War Story, Diane Ackerman

Vilhelm Dahlerup, Elephant Gate, 1901

(March 9) Really heart-warming and really scary at the same time... how did people live like that? Even though war stories were part and parcel of my childhood (TV, movies, Life magazine), it’s hard to go chapter-and-verse through the sufferings of a family you get to "know" intimately.

When I heard about this book through BookCel, I imagined it as a story of Jews and underground activists living beneath, or in, the cages of lions and elephants, having to crouch in fake caves or float under the surfaces of ponds and so on to avoid detection. But it’s really about how the Żabińskis were able to shelter people because of the large footprint and variety of buildings of a zoo. The exotic animals are long gone by the time the Żabińskis start harbouring people, and the people rarely stay in the out-buildings.

Actually, there are a lot of interesting stories about the exotic animals at the beginning, but what I found even more interesting and touching -- to my surprise -- were the stories about the very mundane, unexotic animals the Żabińskis managed to keep around them during the occupation of Warsaw... Borsunio the badger, Moryś the pig, Piotr the hamster, Wicek the rabbit, Kuba the chick, Balbina the cat... they had a mini-zoo going on during the war! And all these little animals’ activities are so heartstring-tugging.

Of course, the human activities during the German attack on and occupation of Warsaw are pretty amazing. It’s unbelievable what people can do with passion and numbers.

Ackerman has a strange style, though, one that took me a while to get used to. Strange imagery starts in the very first sentence: "At dawn in an outlying district of Warsaw, sunlight swarmed around the trunks of blooming linden trees..."

Sunlight swarms??

The brutal nature and weather imagery continues apace. According to Ackerman, nature and the weather are scarier than war, it seems, and she doesn’t drop this trope for long. The following tiny sample of strange imagery took me only seconds to gather:

p. 41 "...she realized that for Ryś the Baltic Sea he’d visited three years earlier probably existed only as a hazy memory that included the crashing surf and the glassy heat of noon sand."

Glassy heat? OK... just strange, not scary.

p. 51 "Tall lindens had begun turning bronze and oaks the burnt maroon of stale blood..."

There is so much blood in her nature descriptions -- this is just one of many images in which trees or plants are "blood red"! And not because of the war! Just because it’s autumn!

p. 125 "As the nights crackled with cold and frost feathered the windowpanes, winds knifed through the rinds of wooden buildings and slit life from the piglets."

p. 301 "Flocks of crows circled the sky before landing in the snow-covered fields, on one of those claggy, warm January mornings when dark tree branches glisten through fog and just breathing feels like inhaling cotton."

I, for one, don’t know "those" January mornings, don’t know what "claggy" means and can’t remember not being able to breathe in a fog. Smoke, car exhaust, hairspray, yes, they feel like inhaling cotton.

It all makes Ackerman’s book memorable, anyway (though not in the way I think she meant).