Category: Books

I never intended this blogging break to get quite so far out of hand, far enough out of hand that I am having difficulty getting myself back to the things I actually want to do.  So today I have to write a blog post.  And I don't really have anything to write about except that life has not yet stabilized around here.  

 

Frankly I don't want to write about that. So what is left?  Books.  I had every intention of writing reviews, but let my mind get sucked into some kind of chaotic vortex and now I can't settle down.  A list, hopefully with a few observations thrown in, may be just the first step I need.

 

Isabel Wilkerson  The Warmth of Other Suns.  This is the only book I managed to read in April.  It was an excellent book, quite scholarly, although it did not necessarily come across as scholarly.  In fact one of the good points I would make about this book is that the scholarship and erudition are executed with a light hand.   The author's technique of weaving the history in throughout the story of three unrelated participants was quite effective although I did, at first, find it difficult to remember the details.  When I started reading the book I did not have time to really follow through quickly, and ended up rereading the book from the beginning at the end of the month. This proved a good technique as the many threads in the book started off seeming quite disparate and the author didn't really manage to tie them together well until near the middle of the book, after which everything became much clearer.  The book shines a light on an often overlooked aspect of US history and is well-worth reading.

 

Carré Otis, Beauty Disrupted.  I read this on the trip to NY.  I had just finished the previous book and wanted something quick to read.  I didn't expect much but was surprised.  From self-absorbed beauty who refused to accept responsibility, Carre Otis managed to survive and grow up.  Perhpas the point I appreciated most was when she wrote that yes, her childhood was messed up, and she was misunderstood, but her parents were doing the best they could and that all families are dysfunctional and everyone is misunderstood.  Granted, some families are more messed up than others, but for most of us the question is wether we let our pasts bring us down or we manage to rise above them.

 

Alexandra Zissu;  The Conscious Kitchen. I was on the waiting list for this book for six weeks.  When I got it I found it mostly dissapointing.  The information is basic, and good if you haven't thought about the source of your food and the implications therein, but there was nothing new I hadn't learned elsewhere.

 

Mark Walton; Boundless Potential.  This book is not so much a step-by-step guide as it is inspirational.  The author interviews people who have reinvented themselves in mid-life and beyond and created new, often more-fulfilling lives.  In the process he starts a discussion about changes in society we are just beginning to face, namely an active, intelligent older population that still has much to offer but it is not necessarily welcomed in a business environment that continues to see middle aged and older people as "over the hill".

 

Suze Orman; Young, Fabulous and Broke and Women and Money. These books were given to me a while back and I hadn't read them.  I wanted to get them off the stack.  I'm basically a fan of Orman anyway, G and I used to enjoy watching her show, and I think she is fabulous.  They were quick reads.  Even though I would consider myself fairly fiscally savy, there were some points that made me think.  Women and Money spends more time dealing with issues that keep women in particular from taking control of their money. Both books are easy to read and filled with good information.

 

Annabel Pitcher;  My Sister Lives on the Mantelpiece is an excellent, powerful and astute novel written from the perspective of a 10 year old boy who is struggling to come to terms with the huge rent in his family following the death of his older sister five years previously. The book is charming and entertaining and deals with bullying, grief, alcoholism, broken families, muslim/non-muslim relations and coming of age in a way that is entertaining, sensitive, and at times heart-breaking.  I highly recommend this book.

 

Tim Gunn; Shaken, not Stirred.  Read in the airport.  Short and sweet.

 

Diane Mott Davidson, Goldy Bear (Schultz) mysteries, complete set (16 novels).  I'm not going to list these, the list is available.  I have read/re-read them all over the last few weeks.  They have been perfectly escapist enough to help me deal with the general turmoil of my life.  I am all for allowing oneself time to escape and wallow a bit before pulling oneself together.  At times they were maddening, and altough I have enjoyed the Goldy books over the years, reading Goldy's exploits all of a piece have reminded me of what a good-hearted but impossible nudge she is, and in many ways, how completely oblivious.  Nonetheless, I will look forward to the next novel whenever it appears.

 

 

I mentioned last week that I had read Paul Fussell's Class: A Guide Through the American Status System, which I finished a few weeks ago.  It is a book that manages to insult almost everyone in a rather snide and wickedly funny manner.  It is also probably a fairly accurate description of class in America as it still stood in 1980.  I'm not saying that class has changed in the intervening years, just that its expression is somewhat different now than it was then.  I am sure Fussell would attribute some of this to proletariat creep in a population with much greater multicultural diversity, as well as the widening influence of what Fussell calls "category x".  I remain convinced that class I still with us, although like everything else, it has evolved and perhaps become more convoluted. Even class X is suspect in my mind, not that I don’t believe it is there, but because I believe it is very difficult to completely escape the influence of class and it seems to me that much of category x is not so much outside of class as a special subset of the highly educated classes with its own sets of bias and anxieties.

Still, dated as I believe the book is, it is informative and useful in ferreting out one's own history and biases, some of which may be so well ingrained and a part of our very natures that we never really thought about their cultural repercussions. Reading the book  also made me address some of my own issues, biases, and reservations about the move from our sequestered house overlooking the Hudson River to our planned community in Knoxville.

 

On a whim, I followed Fussell with John T. Molloy's Why Men Marry Some Women and Not Others, not because I am looking for a husband or even am all that interested in the subject, but because of a recommendation.  It is an engrossingly quick read but also a good solid piece of social science research.  I ended up being fascinated by the research and by the stats.  Highly recommended.

 

Lastly, I just finished Dan Wells' Partials although I am afraid I was somewhat underwhelmed.  Basically, my reservations revolve around the characters, even the main characters,  who seem superficial and oddly character-less.  The adults are extremely narrowly rendered, and they seem like shells of ideas.  Perhaps this is intended, but I would hope that the few adults who survived the loss of everything they new would be more than husks of what I can only assume to be their former selves.  But even though the younger characters were more fully realized than the adults, even they seemed more like shells, especially the protagonist, Kira.  By the end of the book I was willing to conceded that this may have been planned, and that this incomplete development of Kira as a person may play into the development of the story and tie into future volumes, which, in turn, may make them more interesting.  Still it is a long slog, getting through one volume in the hopes of a greater payout in the next volume.  I am not yet sure if I am interested enough to read the next volume when it is released

 

The trip to Texas was successful in that I was able to completely relax and just spend time with my mom in a focused way that has happened for many years.  Being the people we are, some of that time was spent companionably sitting and reading not-very-important novels. Here is a brief list of what I've been reading lately.

 

I did however, finish Nightwoods before I left.  I thought it was an excellent novel.  The main characters are really rather modest people, seemingly minor characters, the kind of people who are often overlooked or ignored, or who are just too often dismissed.  But as in life there is more to each character than meets the eye, if only one is willing to take time to see what lies underneath the surface. Frazier reveals his characters, along with the setting, slowly and resonantly and you come to know them and care about some of them much in the way you would people you have met and gotten to know over time.  It is a novel of character: of loss, of love, of courage.  The prose can be lush or flinty as necessary, but it is never overdone.  Highly recommended.

 

On the flight to Texas I read Diane Mott Davidson's Crunch Time, the newest in the series about the exploits of caterer Goldy Schulz.  It was enjoyable enough, but it didn't seem quite as humerous in its exploits of Goldy's fellow citizens as I remember the early novels being, or perhaps I just enjoyed Goldy's comments about her fellow Episcopalians.  Goldy reminded me of a Virginia Cary Hudson wanna-be, without ever quite pulling it off.  

 

On the flight home I read Stuart Woods' Grass Roots.  This was the first Will Lee novel I have read, although I have encountered Lee in several of Woods' other novels.   It was actually a bit more compelling than I expected, although some parts of the story line did seem incredibly far-fetched, and I enjoyed reading it.  It took me a little longer than my other weekend-reading, perhaps it was a bit more absorbing, and I finished it up yesterday afternoon.   I would say it was better than most of what I have read recently from Woods, but then it is not that new, and I just noticed that it was written 20 years ago, so that may be the explanation right there, but perhaps I will read some of the other Will Lee novels when I get my next entertainment itch.

 

Over the weekend I indulged in even lighter fluff, fluffy birthday visit reading:  Hotel Vendome and Happy Birthday by Danielle Steel.  Both perfectly nice and entertaining though repetitive and predictable, mostly read in snatches here and there, and they were perfectly well suited for that. 

 

And that leaves me with a book I actually read back in January, but never wrote about here, The Cry of the Go Away Bird by Andrea Eames.  This was another book with powerfully evocative prose and I wish I had written about it earlier, when I remembered the details more clearly.   It had been recommended to me as a good coming-of-age novel, and I suppose it is, but it did not really strike me very strongly in that sense, even though it is a powerful novel about a young girl whose world is being ripped apart as she is growing up.  But I didn't see Elise, the main character as really growing up in this novel.  She is a young girl trying to come to terms with a world she does not understand, and although that is a part of the coming-of-age theme, Elise is still a girl here, a girl with moments of profound wisdom, the kind of sharp wisdom girls have when they are on the cusp of verging into adulthood, and which they all too often loose.   When Elise leaves Africa she is still in the midst of this process of trying to find understanding and she is still a girl in waiting.  I do think this is one of the strengths of the novel.  One gets the sense of it being a remininscense, as if it is being told by an older Elise, looking back on her younger self, looking back with yearning and sadness and love.  

 

 

We are finally settling in a bit, and we have had a couple of peaceful quiet evenings.  There is still much unpacking to do but it is going a little bit more easily as G as getting settled into his new surroundings and is no-longer quite as confused and agittated. Anyone with any experience with Alzheimer's/dementia patients would aniticpate this, but even anticipated, it is still exhausting, and the first week was spent more in acclimating ourselves to our new space than in unpacking.  It is not the way I would have thought I would go about settling in but one must make the best of what curves life throws one's way.

 

Our first completely quiet, peaceful evening we sat contentedly reading in the new sunroom/sitting room, still a work in progress, yet transformed since my last post into a cozy nook.  Here is a picture of Sam, on the arm of G's chair, next to the book cart, which contains my current "to be read" pile.  I haven't unpacked the bookends yet, so various foodstuffs and cleaning supplies have been called into action to keep everything in place.

 

We had already been to the local library and G was reading Simon Winchester's Krakatoa, which has actually been on my to-read list for a while now.  I hadn't read anything for a couple of weeks, with all the stress of the actual closing and move, which is not a story I am in any way ready to share, and was perfectly content to settle down with some light mindless escapist reading, so I read Danielle Steele's novel, 44 Charles Street.  It was exactly what I needed, not very realistic, certainly not a book that will stand up to critical reading, but an enjoyable bit of escapism.  Considering that reading one of these novels only takes a couple of hours (you have to be willing to suspend disbelief), or about the same amount of time as a movie, I tend to find it more rewarding than the average movie simply because reading engages my imagination in a way completely different from what I experience when watching a film. 

 

Last night we spent another quiet evening, reading part of the time and then watching Morley Safer's interviews with Dolly Parton, Anna Wintour, and Meryl Streep on "60 minutes".   We split a new-to-me gluten-free beer, Green's Amber Ale, which was actually GOOD.  Yes, the emphasis was needed as too many of the gluten-free beers I have tried just take like amber colored sugar water with a hint of hops.   I'm not really much of a beer drinker, as I find it terribly filling, and half a bottle was perfectly satisfactory. It is nice to think that there is some beer to cook with again, however, and I see a rarebit or a carbonnade in our future. 

 

I started reading Charles Frazier's Nightwoods, and I although I am not far along, I am ready to sink into the author's beautifully rendered, resonant prose, which seems to perfectly capture the essence of a person and a place.  At the moment though, what resonates with me the most is this particular passage:

"You try your best to love the world despite its obvious flaws in design and execution.  You take care of whatever needy things present themselves to you during your passage through it.  Otherwise you're worthless." 

 

But perhaps this is just my all-too-human brain seeking connections and ways to tie the various parts of life into one continuous whole.

 

I picked up Azar Nafisi's book, Things I've Been Silent About on a whim when I was at the bookstore contemplating looking for another copy of her previous book Reading Lolita in Tehran, which I had read, loved, and then lost when I lent it to a friend. In the end I bought this book and promptly let it sit on the shelf for a few years. I am glad that I finally read it.

 

I picked it up in November but did not get very far before I had to set it aside.  The book seemed to intense and difficult for me at that time, filled as it was with strife and very personal memories.  It required more energy than I had available.

 

I started reading it again last week, finishing it on New Years Day.  This time around I was able to engage with the book more fully, though I still found it to be a difficult read in that I would need to walk away and clear my head after certain sections before resuming.  It is a story that is profoundly private and yet vividly public, about a turbulent life which was also wrapped up in a turbulent place and time, it is a story about Nafisi's family and how their story is also her story and how the woman she became is shaped not only by the private drama of her family and her childhood struggle but also by the public drama of the culture, both social and political which surrounds them.  

 

Nafisi tells the reader in the very beginning that this will be a very personal journey:

I do not mean this book to be a political or social commentary, or a useful life story.  I want to tell the story of a family that unfolds against the backdrop of a turbulent era in Iran's political and cultural history.

 

and later:

 

Perhaps the most common of all narratives is one about absent parents and the urgent need to fill in the void created by their deaths.  The process does not lead to closure — at least not for me — but to understanding.  It is an understanding that does not necessarily bring with it peace but perhaps a sense that this narrative might be the only way through which we can acknowledge our parents and in some form bring them back to life, now that we are free, at last, to shape the boundaries of our own story.

 

As usual in my pseudo reviews of books, I am not interested in going into the details of the story as it unfolds.  It is enough to know that Nafisi was a fighter from childhood and that her parents were difficult.  The children were caught between an angry controlling mother and a charming dreamer of a father, both parents completely entangled in their own personal fictions.  It is no wonder that Nafisi became a student of literature, nor that she would be drawn to Nabokov, just as it is also no surprise that she would be a rebel.  These skills help her to analyze her own story and the story of her parents as if she is analyzing a literary text and her storytelling skills help her balance the touchingly personal with the analytic.  

 

She is not completely successful in maintaining this difficult balancing act, and there are times when the book becomes shrill and querelous. Although Nafisi has told us upfront that this is a personal journey, she also tells us she is interested in those fragile intersections — the places where moments in an individual's private life and personality resonate with and reflect a larger, more universal story.   To some extent she is successful in accessing those intersections, but perhaps not completely so.  

 

At the end of the book I was left with the nagging sense of something unfinished, of a story that was yet to begin, although I do think this was intentional, that Nafisi had indeed found an understanding that had been elusive before, and understanding that allowed her to move forward.

 

I will leave you with her closing words:

 

It was only after their deaths that I came to realize that they each in their own way had given me a portable home that safeguards memory and is a constant resistance against the tyranny of man and time.

 

 

Overall, 2011 was terrible year for me reading-wise.  There were long periods where I read nothing beyond skimming the newspapers and blogs.  There was far more frivolous than serious reading.There were other periods were I was up to only reading a page or two a night.  There is also a fairly long list (for me anyway) of books I feel I must read again, books I feel that I fell got short shrift because I was too distracted to focus on  them and give them the attention they deserved.

 

Still,  I feel the need to make some kind of accounting.  If I reviewed a book on the blog there is a link, although you will notice that my ability to take time for reviews stopped for the most part as I got busy preparing to sell our old house and move.  

 

Books I feel I need to read again are marked in red.  In the case of Hustvedt and Wallace, I just felt that I wasn't paying enough attention.  I loved both of the Atwood novels, and they still hover on the fringes of my thoughts, making me think they deserve further consideration.

 

1.  Freedman, David H. Wrong:  Why Experts Keep Failing Us and How to Know When Not to Trust Them.

2. Lebenthal, Alexandra.  The Recessionistas.

3. Niffenegger, Audrey. The Time Traveler's Wife.

4. McMurtry, Larry.  Books.

5. Ripley, Amanda.  The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes — And Why.

6.  Akroyd, Peter. The Trial of Elizabeth Cree.

7.  Kingsolver, Barbara.  The Bean Trees.

8.  Kozol, Maggie.  The Color of Atmosphere.

9.  Patterson, James.  The Postcard Killers.

10. Woods, Stuart. Lucid Intervals.

11. Chabon, Michael.  The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.

12.  Cahill, Thomas.  How the Irish Saved Civilization.

13.  Dineson, Isaak.  Out of Africa.

14. Hirigoyen, Gerard.  Pintxos.

15.  Hoeg, Peter.  The Woman and the Ape.

16. Lewis, Michael.  The Big Short.

17. Martin, Charles.  Chasing Fireflies.

18. Doland, Erin.  Unclutterer:  Unclutter Your Life In One Week

19. Chabris, Christopher.  The Invisible Gorilla.

20.  Chabon, Michael.  Summerland.

21.  Child, Lee.  Worth Dying For.

22.  Child, Lee.  61 Hours.

23.  Winter, Kathleen.  Annabel.

24. McLain, Paula.  The Paris Wife.

25.  Franzen, Jonathan.  The Discomfort Zone.

26.  Woods, Stuart.  Fresh Disasters.

27.  Wallace, David Foster.  The Pale King.

28.  Hamill, Pete.  Tabloid City.

29.  Woods, Stuart.  Hot Mahogany.

30.  Taubes, Gary.  Why We Get Fat

31.  Watts, Duncan.  Everything is Obvious:  Once You Know the Answer.

32.  Brooks, Geraldine.  Caleb's Crossing.

33.  Howe, Ben Ryder.  My Korean Deli.

34.  Lovell, Mary S.  The Churchills: In Love and War.

35.  Child, Julia.  My Life in France.

36.  Reich, Christopher.  Rules of Betrayal.

37. Gordon, Mary.  The Love of My Youth.

38. Staniszewski, Mary Ann.  Believing is Seeing: Creating the Culture of Art.

39.  Collins, Suzanne. The Hunger Games.

40.  Collins, Suzanne.  Catching Fire.

41.  Collins, Suzanne.  Mockingjay.

42.  Jansson, Tove.  Fair Play.

43.  Neville, Stuart. Collusion.

44.  Atwood, Margaret.  The Year of the Flood.

45.  Stockett, Kathryn.  The Help.

46.  Hustvedt, Siri.  The Summer Without Men.

47.  Atwood, Margaret.  Oryx and Crake.

48.  McPhee, Stephanie Pearl.  Knitting Rules!

49. McPhee, Stephanie Pearl.  All Wound Up:  The Yarn Harlot Writes for a Spin.

50.  McPhee, Stephanie Pearl. Free Range Knitter.

51.  Child, Lee.  The Affair.

52. Peacock, Nancy.  A Broom of One's Own.

 

There was very little reading after September aside from the Stephanie Pearl McPhee books which were very light and could be read a few pages at a time.   The last two books were read my first few days in Knoxville.

 

Current Reading:

 Azar Nafisi —  Things I've Been Silent About

Andrea Eames —  The Cry of the Go Away Bird.  

 

As I sat at the table this morning, savoring those few moments when the house remained at rest and all was quiet, I realized that mid-August has crept upon me far too quickly, and I have been far too laid-back in my approach to reaching a few goals concerning this house and the planned move to another.  It is probably a good thing that I always worked well under a deadline.  Once again, however, I may be scarce, or not.  

 

I did however, clear my mind of all the things I had missed writing about, that I intended to share but didn't quite manage.  The past is the past and I shall not dredge it up except as if plays a role in the present or the immediate future.  And this in itself is liberating.

 

But of course the past cannot be completely forgotten.  For example, when I went down to Knoxville a few weeks ago, I took a book to read on the plane.  I looked at other books in the airport at Newark but did not buy anything, assuming, incorrecctly, that I could buy a book at the Knoxville airport should the need arise.  This proved to be a mistake because the book I took was not long enough to get me through two 2-hour flights plus a 1 hour delay, and I was left with over an hour to kill in flight with nothing to read.  

 

But what was that book?  And how does it affect the present?  The book was The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood.   I forgot that it follows Oryx and Crake, which I had not read.  This didn't particularly bother me.  I loved the book and felt it worked well on its own, although I did pick up on the presence of Oryx and Crake in the background, and Jimmy/Snowman, who I didn't even realize was a character in the former book.  But I did realize that it might serve me well to read Oryx and Crake and then perhaps reread The Year of The Flood.  

 

Of course the problem is that I can never go back to The Year of the Flood and read it as if I hadn't read it first.  And I am no longer looking at Oryx and Crake with unjaundiced eyes.  Rather than seeing Flood as the story of minor characters in Oryx, I immediately recognize characters that were minor in Flood, and think of this as fleshing out a different story.  How we read a book depends heavily on what we have read before and how our own experiences and life affects the way we react to the words on the page.  Although I try to read each book separately, without comparison to other works, a work that is written in a series necessarily makes this more difficult.  Reading the work outside of the order in which it was written or intended can completely change the perception of the thing.

 

I am not far into Oryx and Crake at this point, having started it only last night.   But I can already see that I am going to be looking at a world from two overlapping but entirely different perspetives, and I am intrigued.  In many ways this is a gift, an opportunity to explore two views of the same world, in an order that I would not have encountered had I kept up with my reading list.  It is rare that we are able to remind ourselves that what we see is only a fragment of reality viewed through a broken lens. As I see this now, these stolen moments of reading over the next few weeks promise a rich reward, perhaps made richer than they would have been had I started reading the books in the intended order. 

I've just finished reading My Life In France by Julia Child and Alex Prud'Homme and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Julia was, I suppose, a rather late bloomer and this story of her life in France and how she discovered her passion is fascinating.  Julia's voice comes through nicely, the same voice that one finds in her cookbooks, although the book is about far more than food and cooking, and it is partly this voice that keeps the book so enthralling.  The book was pieced together from conversations with Julia, and this conversational quality is one of its strong points.  The book is both rambling and focused, both qualities of Julia Child that I recall from her PBS cooking shows.  Julia doesn't necessarily always bother to translate, just as one would not if one were sitting down and chatting, and in the cadence of the words one can imagine the voice, methodical and practical but also filled with passion, emotion, and memory. I'm surprised this languished unread on my shelf for so long.

 

During the early days of Julia's stay in France, she and her husband were acquainted with Hadley Mowrer, the former Mrs. Hemingway.  This reminded me that I had recently read The Paris Wife, the novel based on the marriage between Ernest Hemingway and Hadley Richardson (later Mowrer).  Julia points out that Hadley was not particularly intellectual or sophisticated, which is also obviously played up in the novel.  The novel had been enjoyable enough but ultimately fell flat.  It seemed obvious, and this may have been the case, that both parties may have truly been in love, but they also married idealized versions of themselves, each of them looking for something or someone to fill a void they felt within themselves.    Their relationship never developed beyond this phase and of course failed because grand illusion can never be sustained indefinitely.  Hadley seems to have had no passion of her own, no interests other than being Mrs. Ernest Hemingway, as if she hoped he would fill her up and be her passion.  But of course Hemingway had his own devils and certainly couldn't sustain himself, much less someone else.  The crumbling of the illusion was obvious long before the end of the book.  I have to say however that I am now interested in reading a little more about Hemingway, a subject that held little interest before reading this novel.

 

Somewhere between the above two books I read The Churchills:  In Love and War.  I can merely say it was okay in a big curl up in the armchair with a glass of wine and indulge in a bit of gossip kind of way.  It was fairly quick to read, and offered very little of substance, and was basically an entertaining bit of fluff.  I'm certainly not above a bit of fluff here and there, and the book did round out my mental images of a few people who, heretofore, had been vague names on the pages of multiple books and histories.

The meetings between cultures are rarely smooth, easy and gentle.  They are more often defined by sharp clashes and rocky shoals, filled with tide pools and unknown currents.  The path of those who attempt to make the crossing is often filled with struggle and danger, both clearly present and hidden.   So too is the life of those who live along these boundaries, due either to circumstances or natural inclination.  

 

Such is the story of both Caleb Cheeshahteaumauk, the first Native American to graduate from Harvard College, and Bethia Mayfield, the preternaturally bright and intellectually curious daughter of a minister on Martha's Vineyard, as designed and told by Geraldine Brooks in her novel Caleb's Crossing.   Bethia, who tells Caleb, her name means servant,  yearns for the education granted unquestionably to her brother and chafes at the limitations of a society where "servant" is a more fitting description of a woman's role than is the word "scholar".  Caleb leaves the life he has known and tries to understand these new people and their view of life, crossing into Puritan culture and life.

 

It is Bethia's voice we hear in this story as she recounts how she an Caleb meet, and the story told is as much her story, how she manages to find her own way through the rocky paths of adolescence to a stable and happy place in society, as it is Caleb's.  Caleb is her friend and his journey is the framework around which Bethia's story is told.  It is a warm, gripping, and touching story and I will not recount it here.   

 

Geraldine Brooks manages to create in Bethia a touching, character who is both familiar to modern readers and yet not at all modern,  a character firmly planted in the 17th century and yet not, a character to whom we could begin to understand, but who definitely looks at the world in a way that we do not.  The conclusions Bethia draws from episodes in the book are not the conclusions I would draw, which is as it should be. It is a sensitive portrait, well told and very engaging.  At times perhaps the author is a bit forceful in driving her points home, but then again, there was very little subtlety in Puritan Belief and thought so I found it forgivable.  

 

I truly enjoyed this book.  One could say I devoured it, hungrily burying myself in the story.  But not only was it a good read, parts of it have stuck to my own rough edges, and keep coming back and haunting me thoughts.  I've not read any of Geraldine Brooks' other novels.  Perhaps I should.

I have just finished reading Kathleen Winter's novel Annabel, and am still rather stunned by the experience. Richly-worded, poignant, touching, and redemptive, although not in that all-too-easy, pat kind of ways that many novels tend to slide into, but with a hard earned and ultimately more rewarding redemption, it is a treasure of a novel, one I wish to hold close to me and dip into again and again.

 

Annabel is the story of an only child, born a true hermaphrodite, into a harsh world, a world where roles are strictly defined.  Arbitrarily it seems, the decision is made, by the father, Treadway, that the child will be a boy. It would have been very easy for Kathleen Winter to portray Treadway as a harsh man but even from the beginning we see his softer edges and we realize that he is acting in what he believes are his sons best interests, and that his motivation is for protection and adaptation in a world that he sees as, in many ways sharply delineated.

 

This arbitrary assignment of gender to a child is very disconcerting, and from the beginning, in the hospital where the child is surgically rendered male, we see this need for self-justification and convincing of the rightness of the decision, which really does not seem that clear at all.  

 

But of course, things aren't that simple.   This rending of the child in two, the outer Wayne and the inner Annabel, has profound repercussions, both for the child who tries to be a good child to both his parents despite his increasing confusion, and his parents.  Treadway has only meant the best for his son, and was convinced that his decision was the best way for his child to face living in a world that can be very harsh in its expectations, but in building up his son, he comes very close to sacrificing his daughter.  

 

Although Jacinta and Treadway muddle through for years, when Wayne/Annabel leaves for the city, they seem to fall apart.   Treadway wishes to retreat more to the combined physical/spiritual world of nature where he is not faced with the pain of the fact that despite his best intentions and his best efforts, he has not "made it right".  Jacinta seems to fall apart completely, but the truth is that she has been slowly disintegrating since that day in the hospital, where the incisions to render her child a boy seems to have cut into her very soul. 

 

Shortly after the surgery, sitting with a friend who has lost a husband and daughter, we have this conversation:

   'If a stranger came here now' Jacinta said, 'they would guess I was the one who had lost a man and a daughter.

'You won't lose Treadway unless you want to lose him.  Treadway is a husband for life.' 

'I know.'

'But it looks to me like I am not the only one who has lost a daughter.'

'I've always felt,' Jacinta said, 'that daughter is a beautiful word.'

And later, when an event has occurred that has lead to the loss of her child's innocense, Jacinta berates herself:

 

    "I am dishonest.  I never tell the truth about anything important.  And as a result, there is an ocean inside me of unexpressed truth.  My face is a mask, and I have murdered my own daughter"

But Wayne does go out into the world, as children do, and begins to find his own path despite opposition and even hurt and pain.  Seeing and accepting his son, and experiencing for the first time the rage of a father against a man who has hurt his daughter, Treadway is forced to reconcile his own feelings and actions with what he knows of the world.  Jacinta has been mourning the loss of a daughter for years, even as she loves the son.  Only when Treadway finds his daughter and makes room for her in his heart can he begin to mend, in his own quiet way, the wounds in his marriage.

 

I highly recommend this novel.  Kathleen Winter takes an exception to what we perceive as normal and forces to question our own perceptions and assumptions, while at the same time telling a compelling story, that is touching, heart-rending, and compelling.  She takes a family and a life and tells it in a way, that it can touch any life, in the best tradition of story-telling.