The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, Corinne May Botz

Frances Glessner Lee, Three Room Dwelling (detail)

(February 11) Miniaturization and unsolved deaths -- what an irresistible combination. The synopsis had me at hello, as it did everyone I told it to:

“The Nutshell Studies were a series of intricately designed dollhouse-style dioramas created by Frances Glessner Lee, a millionaire heiress with an interest in forensic science.

“She designed detailed -- almost obsessive -- scenarios, based on composites of real criminal acts, and presented them physically in miniature. Students were instructed to study the scene and draw conclusions from the evidence presented. Lee used her inheritance to set up Harvard's department of legal medicine, and donated the Nutshell dioramas in 1945 for use in her lectures on the subject of crime scene investigation. In 1966 the department was dissolved, and the dioramas went to the Maryland Medical Examiner's Office; there, Harvard Magazine reports that they are still used for forensic seminars.” (Wikipedia)

Some images of the dioramas are here and here.

The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death’s really a book of photographs, since Corinne May Botz thinks of herself mainly as a photographer, but she does provide a biography of Lee, as well as analytical hints and anecdotes about each of the dioramas.

A major letdown to me right off the bat when I got the book was to learn that the “official solutions” for the unexplained deaths depicted are not available (because the dioramas are still being used as learning tools) -- so, after poring over the photographs and weighing the various forensic opinions offered, you don’t get the thrill of finding out if you drew the right conclusions. Unsporting, I say.

Other than that, the studies are an amazing wonderland to explore.

Lee apparently lavished loads of money and time on these creations, hiring a carpenter full-time to make scale furniture, rooms, moldings, working doors with keys, and so on, and keeping many commercial suppliers busy fabricating custom pieces, while she herself made and dressed the doll corpses. She knit miniature stockings using straight pins as needles, steamed felt into tiny hats, cobbled little shoes. She was supposed to have been very exacting about the 1:12 (inch=foot) scale she used; there are collections of correspondence between her and the suppliers, complaining that dimensions in their catalogues did not sound accurate and warning that she would return her orders if the scale was incorrect.

She never called the studies “dollhouses” nor allowed them to be called that, and wanted them taken very seriously.

Despite all this seriousness and attention to detail, and although they are wonderful, the models to my eyes do look like dollhouses, because of inconsistencies in scale. If her 1:12 scale is uniformly accurate, then apparently we have baseball-sized knobs on our dresser drawers, smoke cigarettes the size of paper-towel rolls, and drink from cups and glasses with inch-and-a-half-thick walls. When the things the “people” are supposed to handle look way too big or way too fine, you’ve got to think “dollhouse.”

Also, Lee used prefabricated bisque heads and limbs to make the corpses, and there is just no way, even if the faces are individually hand-painted, that that sort of creature is ever going to look other than doll-like. You wonder why Lee didn’t sculpt her own figures out of wax or cast her own bisque or something.

On the other hand, looking through all the little death scenes, I felt more vulnerable and mortal than I ever have looking at photos of real death scenes, or watching violent movies. God, if these terrible things could happen to sweet little dolls, what chance is there for us human beings?

Tender Is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald

Gordon Bryant, F. Scott Fitzgerald

(February March 25) OK, so Scott was a beeeelyun times the writer Zelda ever was.

This is a beautifully told story, and I was particularly struck by the contrast between how modern Fitzgerald sounds and how long ago 1925 was... Dick Diver sounds like someone you'd meet at a contemporary party, whereas the world of Tender Is the Night is a strange alternate universe where you become an outcast if you're ever caught drunk in public.

I say Fitzgerald sounds modern, as though to imply that his contemporaries didn't; but of course Hemingway, Eliot, Faulkner, Woolf, etc., sound modern, too -- although I'd say they sound self-consciously modern, which Fitzgerald doesn't to me. He doesn't seem to be worried about creating new forms for the novel; he seems to be wanting to give you the novel version of Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale," with his own life as the lab specimen.

In conclusion: Fitzgerald was a beautiful writer. His descriptions are breathtaking. There is also something almost Shakespearean about him in his ability to sketch a whole scene and its mood in only a few words: "Amiens was an echoing purple town, still sad with the war"... "A white sun, chivied of outline by a white sky, boomed over a windless day" ...and to capture those odd perceptions we all have but don't have names for: "Later she remembered all the hours of the afternoon as happy -- one of those uneventful times that seem at the moment only a link between past and future pleasure but turn out to have been the pleasure itself."

Also, if I'm comparing the treatment of the dissolution of the Fitzgeralds' marriage here and in Save Me the Waltz, then I have to say that Scott's version is far nobler, kinder... and sadder.

Save Me the Waltz, Zelda Fitzgerald

Zelda Fitzgerald, Self-Portrait

(December 26) I wanted to find out that the critics were wrong -- that Zelda Fitzgerald was actually a decent writer who was continuing to suffer a bias against her encouraged by fans of Scott Fitzgerald for having choked off the greater writer’s potential. This always seemed an unfair attitude to take, given that her celebrated husband wouldn’t have been much without her. After all, she provoked him to do crazy, romantic things that he later wrote about, she was the inspiration for all his major heroines, and it was well known that he pilfered from her diaries for scenes and ideas.

Or was I maybe brainwashed at a young age by Nancy Milford’s biography of Zelda?

Was Zelda actually a burden on Scott, an attention-seeker dabbling in the arts like a sort of mean-spirited Lucy to Scott’s Ricky?

“Hemingway saw that in this family the wife continually interfered with her husband’s work because she was jealous of it. Her frantic efforts to become a painter, a ballerina, and a writer were part of that jealousy.”

-- Harry T. Moore, preface to the Southern Illinois University Press edition of Save Me the Waltz

Or was she (even more sadly) simply always mentally ill?

I would say there was some oppression:

In its time, however, the book was not well received by critics...The failure of Save Me the Waltz, and Scott’s scathing criticism of her having written it -- he called her “plagiaristic” and a “third-rate writer” -- crushed her spirits.

--Wikipedia

Unfortunately, the mixed reviews for her semi-autobiographical novel (e.g., “a literary curio,” “full of rhetorical effects that owe more to derangement than to inspiration”), including Henry T. Moore’s gentle warning that the first third may seem a bit turgid, are more than fair. The first third is terribly turgid, as though Zelda wanted to prove that she knew a lot of “big words.” Random sentence by way of example: “The sum of her excursions into the irreconcilabilities of the human temperament taught her also a trick of transference that tided her over the birth of the last child.” Wha-a-a-t?

But once Alabama (Zelda) hooks up with David (Scott), Save Me the Waltz becomes quite vivid and interesting, a peek into the real lives of literary legends of nearly 100 years ago. The book takes up a non-localized-consciousness style and is as good as anything Virginia Woolf might do. The quality of the light in a certain scene, or the smell in a ballet studio or a ship cabin, or a view of the flowers in a dining room, all convey the slow dissolution of the Fitzgeralds’ heyday unbelievably effectively.

Also, to vindicate Zelda a little bit, there’s no sign that Alabama was jealous of David’s achievements (though there are plenty of signs that she couldn’t take the monotony of their partying life). If Alabama reflects Zelda, then Zelda wasn’t a “dabbler,” either -- she was, rather, desperate to feel the ecstasy she could see other artists feeling, and went in whole-hog to feel it herself.

“I have been to the Russian ballet,” Alabama tried to explain herself, “and it seemed to me -- Oh, I don’t know! As if it held all the things I’ve always tried to find in everything else.”

...

At night she sat in the window too tired to move, consumed by a longing to succeed as a dancer. It seemed to Alabama that, reaching her goal, she would drive the devils that had driven her -- that, in proving herself, she would achieve that peace which she imagined went only in surety of one’s self -- that she would be able, through the medium of the dance, to command her emotions, to summon love or pity or happiness at will, having provided a channel through which they might flow. She drove herself mercilessly, and the summer dragged on.

The Undomestic Goddess, Sophie Kinsella

Anthony Holden, This Girl Loves Carrots

(December 25) A New York Post reviewer apparently said: "Kinsella is at the top of the chick-lit game... [She] skewers high-powered city life, while delivering a romantic comedy anyone who subsists on takeout will appreciate... Light yet filling." I really can't add to or improve on that.

Sample:

..."Happy birthday to you..."
The waiter puts the tray down in front of me, but my hands are full with phones.
"I'll take that for you," says Lorraine, relieving me of Daniel's phone. She lifts it to her ear, then beams at me. "He's singing!" she says, pointing to the receiver encouragingly.
"Samantha?" Mum is saying in my ear. "Are you still there?"
"I'm just... They're singing 'Happy Birthday'..."
I put the phone on the table. After a moment's thought, Lorraine puts the other phone carefully down on the other side of me.
This is my family birthday party.
Two cell phones.
I can see people looking over at the singing, their smiles falling a little as they see I'm sitting on my own. I can see the sympathy in the faces of the waiters. I'm trying to keep my chin up, but my cheeks are burning with embarrassment.
Suddenly the waiter I ordered from earlier appears at the table. He's carrying three cocktails on a tray and looks at the empty table in slight confusion.
"Who is the martini for?"
"It was... supposed to be for my brother..."
"That would be the Nokia," says Lorraine helpfully, pointing at the mobile phone.
There's a pause -- then, with a blank professional face, the waiter sets the drink down in front of the phone, together with a cocktail napkin.

Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse, Breaking Dawn, Stephenie Meyer

Edward Burne-Jones, Love Among the Ruins

(November 28, November 30, December 9, December 14) I read Twilight to find out what all the fuss was about the movie, and then I could not stop. The books are, as many have noted, like crack cocaine.

The detox program is over at Cleolinda Jones’ recaps.

Sample of Twilight in Fifteen Minutes:

EDWARD: Hello. Please... allow me to introduce... myself. I am... Edward Cullen.

BELLA: Where were you all week? And why were you such a jerk?

EDWARD: I had to... go. Somewhere. For reasons totally unrelated to wanting to kill you.

BELLA: Did you get contacts while you were somewhere? Last week your eyes were black, and this week they are golden melted topaz butterscotch.

EDWARD: *stares, turns around, leaves*

BELLA: WHAT IS YOUR DEAL?!

Twilight is basically Seventeenth Summer meets Jane Eyre meets the X-Men ... a weird and unique little creation that hooks you in, fair and square. The sequels, on the other hand, are a whole different kettle of unputdownable fish.

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, David Wroblewski

Pablo Picasso, Boy with Dog

(November 20) This is such an awesome book.

I pictured myself blogging “This is such an awesome book” before I was even halfway through it, but I thought I would be writing it for much different reasons -- like, totally different.

The first half of the book is this lovely bucolic story about a sensitive boy who grows up in a dog-breeding family -- dog-breeding itself being really interesting as a science and an art -- and though the boy has a small handicap, his life is really wonderful and wondrous, and all of this is told by a very accomplished and gentle narrator. You sense that something dreadful is going to happen to test the boy and the dogs, but you hope there will be a minimum of suffering (for both people and dogs).

But then, suddenly, shockingly, this book morphs into something else entirely -- a hoary old horror story that’s haunted English literature for the last 500 years (and I think never so chillingly as in this incarnation), and it’s not only shocking that The Story of Edgar Sawtelle has the nerve to do this but it’s dumbfounding that it turns out to have been set up so well -- everything fits perfectly through the morph; the whole first half of the book brilliantly lulls you into thinking it’s quite a different tale, but then you can’t deny it was that dark, depressing tragedy all along. In other words, it’s not an Ian McEwen-style, artistic-licence “surprise!”

I can remember the moment I realized it was Shakespeare -- it actually made my hair stand on end, gave me a psychological jolt. I had been thinking, Heh, an uncle moves in on his brother’s widow, just like Hamlet -- of all the things to make me think of Hamlet!--; and, heh, the uncle’s name is Claude -- and then -- omigod the mother’s name is Trudy -- !

And then all the characters step into place -- Polonius, Ophelia, Fortinbras, Laertes, the witches... everybody (OK, the witches are from Macbeth). It’s like a black-light performance when all the suited stunt-people emerge from the backdrop and you realize the plate was really carried, not thrown, across the stage ... only this time the suited stunt-people are those ghoulish murdering Danes and their psychopath prince, our old friends. Sigh.

Even though it’s modern people and dogs filling the roles, Wroblewski captures all of Hamlet’s most enthralling issues really well and often exquisitely -- was King Hamlet really murdered, or is Hamlet insane? Was Gertrude complicit? Did Hamlet kill Polonius deliberately or by accident? In fact, his reinvention of some characters gave me new insights into the old play, particularly into the character of Laertes. And the dog versions of some of the characters offer some sweet interpretations.

However, having become so attached to the characters as they are in the first half of the book, and knowing how Hamlet ends, I had to read the last half of the book out of the corner of my eye, desperately clinging to the hope that Wroblewski would revert back to the pastoral tale eventually, or at least depart creatively from Hamlet. A writer could and might do that, right?

So, overall, quite the emotional rollercoaster ride of a book, and thrilling in a way no story about growing up in farm country should ever be.

(That other book, about the sensitive boy who learns or teaches a life lesson through his dogs and his muteness, would also have been good.)

The Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides

Hugo Simberg, The Wounded Angel

(October 9) For a book about suicides, this is a lot of fun. Eugenides is such a good story-teller and so vivid with the images that it doesn’t matter how morose his subject matter is -- it’s enjoyable. Also, from the very beginning, the girls who commit suicide are disembodied, ephemeral beings, not concrete characters -- they are the idealized obsessions of a group of boys who never knew them very well and who attempt many years later to understand them by piecing together scraps of clothing, shreds of paper and memories of fleeting interactions.

We aren’t given a lot of details about the boys, either -- some of them are mentioned in the third person and have individual quirks, but we’re not sure how many there are exactly and we have no information whatsoever about the central narrator: he is always an amorphous “we.” Nevertheless, because everything is presented from “their” point of view, “they” feel real and we identify with their teenage agonies. This is really, after all, the boys’ tragedy -- they must face the horror that they are fixed in time by the girls’ deaths, forever yearning for the intensity of feeling and drive they experienced so briefly and lost so abruptly.

So it’s a very interesting and nervy approach Eugenides is taking here, but the “group narrator” is sustained beautifully throughout and the lament for lost innocence feels pretty fresh for such an old, oft-visited theme.

Eugenides is obviously intensely interested in teenage angst -- it’s a huge component of Middlesex as well -- and I think he’s very adept at recreating it, particularly middle-class '70s teen angst. There is a brilliant “conversation” between the boys and girls conducted exclusively by playing popular '70s songs to each other:

the Lisbon girls: “Alone Again, Naturally,” Gilbert O’Sullivan
us: “You’ve Got a Friend,” James Taylor
the Lisbon girls: “Where Do the Children Play?,” Cat Stevens
us: “Dear Prudence,” The Beatles
the Lisbon girls: “Candle in the Wind,” Elton John
us: “Wild Horses,” The Rolling Stones
the Lisbon girls: “At Seventeen,” Janice Ian
us: “Time in a Bottle,” Jim Croce
the Lisbon girls: “So Far Away,” Carole King

Hilarious, and like a quick trip back in time.

The Birth House, Ami McKay

Vincent Desiderio, Woman in White Dress

(September 5) So this is like equal parts The Lost Salt Gift of Blood (grim lives in Nova Scotia), The Cider House Rules (women’s reproductive issues) and The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery (small-town life in the pre-First World War Maritimes) -- with a dash of The Witches of Eastwick (the movie) or something by Isabel Allende thrown in.

I don’t mean by listing all these components to say this is a Frankenstein kind of a book -- it’s actually a really nicely done fictional autobiography that works in all the big news events of the early 20th century while taking some interesting stands on women’s power and on science vs. traditional medicine. And if there was nothing else worthwhile in the whole book, I’d still be grateful for learning about the Boston Molasses Disaster, which I’d never heard a peep about before and assumed was McKay’s invention. It was too preposterous to believe that a large urban area could be flooded with molasses, and too ironic that it would be Boston, the home of Boston Baked Beans.

So that was cool, and, anyway, there is lots else that’s worthwhile in The Birth House.

Interesting that, like The Hindi-Bindi Club, there are recipes -- but these are for folk remedies rather than family meals.

My only quibble with the book is that I don’t think Dora, the narrator, adds up convincingly as a character. Sometimes she sounds like a sophisticated modern woman; other times a backwoods girl. Sometimes she is scornful of Miss B.; other times she takes it for granted that she is Miss B.’s spiritual heir. She seems to be in a fog about her relationships with her family. Where did her highbrow taste in literature come from given her environment? Why does she paint her life as isolated and starved when in fact it’s a pretty busy little village they’ve got going there? It might be that the author wanted to make Dora’s intuitiveness about childbirth as mystic as possible, but it doesn’t really hang together well as that. It’s disjointed; at times it’s hard to relate to Dora’s character as other than a vehicle for an imaginative take on historical events.

Amazingly enough, this doesn’t detract from an interesting, inventive, and occasionally quite suspenseful read.

The Hindi-Bindi Club, Monica Pradhan

Jennifer Ott, Lakshmi Gold

(September 1) This is a really likable book -- pleasant as can be, beautifully symmetrical in structure, brimming with themes of interest to women and armchair anthropologists.

Six women tell their stories -- three mothers born in India (one from each of the three major regions of India, tidily) and three daughters born in the States. Each woman is dealing with one cultural problem, one marital problem, one health problem, one non-marital-relationship problem, and one vocation problem, all different for each character. Each one has a cooking specialty, a style of dress and a particular secret. Each one has certain sacred notions challenged and resolved. All the mothers have to come to terms with the foreignness of their daughters, and all the daughters must come to terms with the foreignness of their mothers.

We learn a lot about Indian culture, particularly about the distinctions between Bengal, Punjab and Mumbai customs and between Hindu and Muslim religions, and I couldn't help comparing the approach taken here with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's in Half of a Yellow Sun and Purple Hibiscus since they're opposite ends of a spectrum. Pradhan pauses to explain and translate everything and goes so far as to provide recipes for all the dishes mentioned; she definitely sees her audience as non-Indian and is offering the carefully guided tour. Adichie somehow instructs without tour-guiding. It says so much about how it must be to be the child of immigrant parents, as Pradhan is -- one is always straddling two cultures, always explaining the one to the other. You probably can't not do it.

In fact, I found the daughters almost too comfortably American -- their adjustment problems are exclusively with their Indian backgrounds -- there is little reference to the assimilation tensions first-generation children have in North America, which surprised me, since I don't recall the '60s and '70s (when these girls were allegedly growing up) having the levels of cultural enlightenment we do now.

But that would have been a completely different book, heh.

Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides

View of a section of the Elgin Marbles

(August 19) I really enjoyed this rollicking tale -- the guy can tell a story and knows how to create colourful characters. I'm seeking out The Virgin Suicides (Eugenides' first book) as we speak.

When Middlesex was being lauded in the press and by readers I know, I was skeptical -- I thought the hermaphrodite theme would be all over-the-top dragshow tranny meme-ing, designed to appeal to prurient readers. I wasn’t interested in hearing how a monosexual guy would imagine being a hermaphrodite (though I would be interested in an actual hermaphrodite's autobiography).

But I kept hearing Middlesex was good, particularly about the Detroit race riots in the '60s, and I kept seeing it on "best" book lists, and finally Kerry really recommended it and loaned me her copy.

As it turns out, the hermaphrodite business is handled very gently and sweetly, and the hermaphrodite, Callie/Cal, is actually the least interesting character in the book -- he/she's just kind of neutral, the ecru background against which the colourful characters swagger. As the adult male narrator, Cal is convincing and likable, but it's hard to picture him as the little girl he says he was. And that can’t be because a male author is unable to imagine what it's like to be female -- the best character in the book is Desdemona, Cal's paternal grandmother. She and all the women are as vivid as real life, and the men -- Lefty, Dr. Philobosian, Jimmy Zizmo, Milton, Father Mike -- are equally compelling. (Maybe that's a point being made, hmm.)

But mainly Middlesex is a boisterous 20th-century Odyssey (not that Eugenides strains this parallel) that hits a lot of exciting historical highlights as it pans from Europe to North America and back again. The Detroit history was interesting as advertised, but I was really taken with Desdemona and Lefty's story of growing up in Bithynios and fleeing the war. It made me want to drink bitter coffee and take up the hookah.

A Hairdresser's Experience in High Life, Eliza Potter

Camille Silvy, Sarah Forbes Bonetta (Sarah Davies)

(July 16) This one came to me via A Dress a Day, whose Erin mentioned it because of all the descriptions of 1840s and '50s clothes, particularly ball gowns.

But I got interested in it because of the cool time-travel effect of reading the memoirs of a woman who had a unique vantage on the aristocracy of her day, and who had travelled a lot and seen many things. She didn't have much school -- she started dressing hair and nannying at a young age -- but, despite a certain amount of disjointedness in her narrative, she was able to tell a good anecdote and make acute observations, and was fun to read. "Good on her that she wrote a book," I was thinking.

It was then a shock to find out when I was already about 50 pages into it that Eliza Potter was black! This made her abolitionist stance and her many descriptions of herself challenging slave-owners all the more heroic, and I’d been convinced of her courage already.

It was also surprising to see how different racism was at that time. Iangy (Potter's name for herself as narrator) and other black people consort freely in white company (Iangy was often at high-society parties as a guest on top of peeking in on them when she was dressing hair) and that is OK because they are free people. However, slaves were not allowed to sit at the same table as free people (although Iangy makes a point of challenging this several times and kind of shames some conservatives).

There was a surprising amount of interracial marriage -- white men marrying black women mostly -- and not infrequently it was a slave becoming the wife of a plantation owner or a well-to-do householder. Iangy reviews a good number of these instances, because she always found ex-slaves to be the cruellest slave-masters.

Also, slavery was not always wretched abuse, according to some of Iangy's stories. Sometimes the slaves are able to require conditions when they are bought and sold, and these are always honoured.

Next most cognitively dissonant: the rampant adultery. People were always cheating on their spouses and carrying on, at least in the upper classes, and quite often with little damage to their social status. In the Victorian Age! Why do we think people are more "immoral" today??

So, yes, it's a gossip-fest.

Water for Elephants, Sara Gruen

Hong, Elephant

(July 15) This was a great story -- it had animals, a great love story, a great murder mystery, fascinating information about circuses in the 1930s, some surprise twists and turns, and she's a good story teller... everything I could want in a book.

It didn't even need the memoir part, in my opinion -- but Gruen did some clever things with the transitions between modern Jacob and '30s Jacob, and the device creates a cool mobius-strip effect at the conclusion.

My only quibble with it, and this is just minor, would be that in the sections set in the '30s the people sound modern, rather than like they're living and speaking in the '30s. I'm basing this only on impressions of '30s movies and books I know of so it's not a well-informed opinion. I didn't expect to see expressions like "you shred it, wheat" or "hoo-ha" every two sentences but I did expect there'd be a little of that. Anyway, it certainly didn't detract from a great read.

A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L'Engle

Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, Merryweather, Fauna and Flora

(July 7) I had seen this on so many top-100 fiction lists, and so many people whose taste I respect have said they loved it, and it was so reverently discussed on my favourite website, that it seemed like A Wrinkle in Time would be pure rapture... like it would open up whole new universes of imaginative inventions, memorable characters, and thrilling action, à la the Harry Potter series or The Golden Compass.

Alas, no. I was disappointed. And I don't think it was because my expectations were so high they could never be met. The story didn't seem well thought out; it rushed disjointedly from one strange event or bit of science to another, and it couldn't decide whether to have the style and tone of a '60s sci-fi TV show or a Grimm's fairy tale. I kept checking my copy of the book to see if a folio was missing or something.

The point-of-view character, Meg, is little more than a collection of geeky quirks and she's often unappealingly crabby for no good reason. L'Engle seems to set up her impatience and stubbornness as virtues -- as though blind anger will save us all. Hmm.

The book touches on big topics in philosophy, physics, classics, politics, etc., and lovers of the book cite this as L'Engle's great contribution to children's literature, but to my mind these historical touchstones are simply thrown in randomly, sometimes oddly, and never developed or properly interwoven into the action or the characters' motivations.

Also, I don't think that my disappointment was caused by reading this with an adult's jaundiced eye -- I am certain it would have reminded my 10-year-old self of those Saturday-morning “filler” cartoons we barely tolerated while waiting for the “good” cartoons to come on, back in the day -- the ones full of unsympathetic protagonists running back and forth in front of half-sketched, endlessly repeating backgrounds.

The Miracle at Speedy Motors, Alexander McCall Smith

Tebogo Mogapi, The Gaborone Raid, June 14, 1985

(June 19) More along the lines of the last three -- interesting puzzles, eccentric people, plenty of ethics-wrangling. Nice and open-ended so there can be more.

McCall Smith has a lot of fun with chapter titles and a flamboyant bed purchased by Mma Makutsi.

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, Lisa See

An Ho, Wang Xifeng

(June 14) I really enjoyed this “autobiography” of a girl growing up in the hinterlands of 19th-century China. Like Memoirs of a Geisha, The Far Pavilions, I, Claudius, even Gone with the Wind, it seems to create a vivid, you-are-there experience of life in an exotic culture and a remote time. It’s the combination of (1) the sense that the author has done exhaustive research into the time and culture and (2) the intimacy of the first-person narration.

Lisa See is particularly good at providing “the insider view” -- the narrator does not seem to be explaining her culture to foreigners, she’s assuming the customs and motivations are already familiar; she’s unconscious to her culture, as we all are. As a BookCel member says, “the protagonist does not appear to be a 21st-century feminist playing period dress-up.”

And the details about foot-binding, family structures, nu shu, laotong relationships, marriage customs, economics and more are fascinating. It’s all women culture, but the way it’s presented, so vividly and devotedly, undermines any knee-jerk-feminist disapproval one might harbour about apparently misogynistic customs. You may have found it unbelievable that women put up with the mutilation of their feet, and See is not an apologist, but Snow Flower and the Secret Fan makes you appreciate how the pressures of culture are irresistible, and sometimes even yield rewards.

The Memory Keeper's Daughter, Kim Edwards

Heather Spears, Drawing of a Child with Down Syndrome

(June 10) This was one of those completely-don’t-get-it books for me. It was a #1 New York Times Bestseller and there are many on-line reviews in which readers rave about the book and list it as one of the three best books of the year or one of their Top 10 of all time... and I can’t see the enthusiasm at all. There are books I don’t like well but can still see why others would like them a lot, but this is not one of those. This is a book that you might grudgingly finish reading because it opens so well and you hope that the writer will rise to the occasion again... but she never does, so you finish the book with the writer greatly in your debt. You can forgive her and just lick your wounds, but you can’t rave about that book and rank it high.

The first chapter would have made a cool short story. The author did a really virtuoso job of weaving in a lot of camera science and technology as metaphors. These things made me give her the benefit of the doubt. But it was kind of a timid novel, never getting out of two dimensions, and I looked at my watch the whole time I read it.

Purple Hibiscus, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Uche Edochie, Perfect Illusions

(May 23) Loved this as much as Half of a Yellow Sun, for the same reasons -- the vivid and appealing characters, the cultural illumination, the humanity of the vision. It’s quite a different story, though -- it’s a girl’s coming-of-age in a dysfunctional family, as the daughter of a man whose public persona is heroic and generous, but who’s actually a religious fanatic and a sadistic tyrant. In some ways it’s more tense and scary than a war saga.

Basically, when within half an hour of starting it, a book has got me burning to hatchet-murder a fictional character, I know I’ve got a powerful book on my hands.

Half of a Yellow Sun, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Uche Okeke, Refugee Family

(May 14) Loved. Loved so much I could not turn to any other writer right away despite trying hard, and finally went out and got Adichie’s first novel, Purple Hibiscus, just to have some more of her.

The characters are interesting and endearing, and their struggles with the Biafran war of secession against Nigeria are spell-binding. I really enjoyed the cultural immersion -- Adichie has a skillful way of presenting customs, things, foods, words, etc., that would be exclusively Nigerian so that they seem natural but are also accessible to foreign readers.

I was most amazed by my own ignorance about what was going on in Biafra, which was all the news when I was in high school. I can’t believe I was so unaware. I thought it was famine alone.

So it was good story, anthropology lesson, and history / poli sci lesson all in one, and very well done.

Also, it’s heart-breaking.

The Thirteenth Tale, Diane Setterfield

James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Speke Hall

(April 30) I really enjoyed this and would highly recommend it, particularly to fans of Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and The Woman in White. The author actually blends all the signature elements of those stories into one of her own, adding in a few extra twists, and I think it’s really well done.

For example, there are two narrators, a take on the nested narrators in Wuthering Heights, but, here in The Thirteenth Tale, because of what they’re going through, the narrators blend and merge in a dreamy way and become indistinguishable at times, causing reader double-takes in a very cool fashion.

Most of the characters in The Thirteenth Tale themselves, in fact, are fans of Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and The Woman in White and refer to the books quite often (especially Jane Eyre), so there’s some meta going on as well, to modernize things. In fact, I was a little skeptical about the book for the first 40 or 50 pages -- it’s clearly a book-lover’s book for book-lovers, a concept done to death these days, I think. But The Thirteenth Tale definitely became enchanting and, I’d say, stakes a claim for a life of its own.

The basic mystery itself is absorbing -- Setterfield is good at red herrings, bizarre clues and limited points of view -- and thrillingly creepy at times. Friends who recommended The Thirteenth Tale to me reported staying up till the wee hours to find out how the mystery is resolved and I can see why (although I personally did not pull an all-nighter to finish it).

The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls

Charles Blackman, Children Playing

(April 24) Riveting account of what it’s like to be raised by two free-spirited, 1960s-style full-blooded hippies, who aren’t going to follow society’s rules, work for the man, poison their bodies, compete with fellow human beings, etc. -- they were going to use their genius to make their fortune and live self-sufficiently and high-mindedly ever after.

Andrea recommended it -- but she was horrified by the story because she is a mother with young kids, and she can’t imagine exposing children to the danger, deprivation and instability that the Walls kids experienced.

I on the other hand was kind of swept up in the romanticism of their life -- the kids got to do a lot of amazing things and developed some really amazing skills -- and they weren’t really in a lot of danger a lot of the time. LOL. They certainly all turned out well.

It’s clear that Jeannette Walls herself is bitter about the way she grew up -- in telling the story, she belabors certain hardships, quotes her parents as ironically as possible and is proud to have ultimately led the charge to escape from the parents. In fact, it’s kind of a case study of how kids turn out exactly opposite to their parents.

Later on, though, the parents seem less creative and more self-serving. The mother lost me when she hid a chocolate bar from her starving kids and the father when he stole the kids’ hard-earned escape money.

Also, I feel bad for ever suspecting in school that kids who took food from the garbage cans were gross and / or pigs. How can we ever have thought of them that way? They were starving children, for god’s sake.