Reading in Rondavels

I have a whole list of books that I want to discuss, but I thought it would be fun (and satisfyingly dilatory) to look back at the books I read while in Lesotho.  Sure, as a kid I had endless summers to read, checking out 10 books at a time from the library and discovering everything from Charlotte Brontë to Mary Higgins Clark, but what glory to have a year of unimpeded, unregulated reading time as as adult!  The only limit was the lack of access to bookstores, but the happy side-effect of that was picking up some books from the pile contributed by former volunteers and visitors that I probably would not have read otherwise.

So, here it is, my list from the year of magical reading:

September

True at First Light, Ernest Hemingway
Three Cups of Tea, Greg Mortenson
Tender at the Bone, Ruth Reichl
Comfort Me with Apples, Ruth Reichl
The Little Book, James Selden
Mansfield Park, Jane Austen

October

The Yiddish Policeman's Union, Michael Chabon
David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
(Two books?  What happened in October?  I blame Ellen and Will's arrival and Charles Dickens's verbosity.)

November

Mother Night, Kurt Vonnegut
Can You Forgive Her?, Anthony Trollope
And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie
The Sea, John Banville

December

A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
Death on the Nile, Agatha Christie
A Fine Balance, Rohinton Mistry
The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov
My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead, ed. Jeffrey Eugenides
Islands in the Stream, Ernest Hemingway

January

People of the Book, Geraldine Brooks
Twilight, Stephanie Myers (one guilty 18 hour flight from D.C. to Jo'burg)
The Given Day, Dennis Lehane
The Mayor of Casterbridge, Thomas Hardy
The Final Solution, Michael Chabon

February

American Wife, Curtis Sittenfield
Rabbit, Run, John Updike
Unless, Carol Shields
Red Harvest, Dashiell Hammett
Brighton Rock, Graham Greene
Moo, Jane Smiley
White Noise, DeLillo
Far from the Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy

March

Long Walk to Freedom, Nelson Mandela
Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen
Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz
Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen
The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, David Wroblewski
Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert

April

The Ambassadors, Henry James
Lark and Termite, Jayne Anne Phillips
Net of Jewels, Ellen Gilchrist
Year of Wonders, Geraldine Brooks
Goodbye to All That, Robert Graves
The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami

May

The White Lioness, Henning Mankel
The Smell of the Night, Andrea Camillieri
Christine Falls, Benjamin Black
The Wapshot Chronicle, John Cheever
The Wapshot Scandal, John Cheever
The Time Traveler's Wife, Audrey Niffenberger
Emma, Jane Austen
Written Lives, Javier Marías

June

A Homemade Life, Molly Wizenberg
Belong to Me, Marisa de los Santos

And....then apparently I stopped keeping track.  So close to the end!  54 books, not counting whatever it was I read in June, July, and August.

Utterly subjective ratings:
Highly recommended (even if you're living somewhere a bit more hectic than a rondavel on the edge of Mokhotlong)
Fun (if you have close to unlimited reading time)
Skip it (would kind of resent having to read this again)
I suppose all of the others would fall somewhere in between.

Cutting for Stone: Brief Review

The recently-read books are piling up and inducing guilt, so I'm just going to post a quick couple of thoughts about Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese.  We read this for our book club, suggested by one of our members whose family is peppered with medical professionals.  Verghese is himself a doctor, and shares a similar background as his main character, Marion Stone, a child of Indian and British descent who is born and raised in Ethiopia and immigrates to the United States to complete his medical training.  The other details of Marion's life are, one hopes, a little more fantastical than Verghese's.

Marion and his twin brother, Shiva, are born to an Indian nun at Missing Hospital, where she and their supposed father, the surgeon Thomas Stone, both worked.  The twins are connected at the head, and their traumatic labor causes the death of their mother.  Stone, unable to cope, flees Ethiopia.  And yes, I just spent a whole post complaining about bildungsromane, but this book is going to have to make me hedge a little.  While a large portion of the novel is concerned with Marion's coming-of-age,  Marion always seems to be looking back on his childhood in a believable way, and Verghese does not particularly attempt to make Marion's voice the voice of a child.  Additionally, Verghese establishes the other, adult, characters in such a compelling and warm way that Marion's voice never really grates.  Hema, the twin's adoptive mother, and Ghosh, their stand-in father, carry a large portion of the first half of the book with their combination of strength and limitations.  Hema and Ghosh are both also doctors, and somewhat reluctant surgeons, so the whole book is infused with the air of the hospital.

We discussed in our book club the many "coincidences" and fantastic plot twists, but decided that in some way the book makes you buy into the possibility of such happenings.  Perhaps the emphasis on science and medicine actually helps this buyability--Marion is not an irrational man, so his retelling of the story, filled though it might be with improbabilities, seems trustworthy and reasonable. 

Though I had a hard time getting away from the prejudice that Verghese writes well "for a doctor," I think it would be more just to say that Verghese writes well, period.  His descriptions of Ethiopia and the life of the hospitals both at Missing and in New York are revealing and often beautiful, and most of his characters are finely drawn.  The exception to this, I would say, is the character of Genet, Marion's love obsession throughout the book.  Verghese never really seems to fully access insight into her motivations or Marion's attraction to her.

These thoughts are getting longer than originally intended, but, hey, this is a long book.  More reviews to come soon!

God on the Rocks: Review

Hmmm...so writing reviews of books that you didn't really enjoy reading turns out to be not as much fun.  Actually, it's overstating things to say that I didn't enjoy God on the Rocks at all.  It's just that I've enjoyed Jane Gardam's other books so much that this one felt like a let-down.  In the interest of making prejudices clear, I really have something against books about children.  I mean, I like children.  I'm sure they would have interesting things to say, if they ever wrote novels themselves.  But I kind of hate reading adults' interpretations of a child's world.  In most bildungsroman, I really only like it once the narrator has reached, say, fifteen.

While nearly all child narrators are somehow precocious (otherwise they wouldn't know all of the big words that their adult puppetmasters force upon their lips), they do provide a tempting canvas on which to paint a distorted picture of the adult world.  Children are credited with understanding the world in a unique and prescient way; because they don't always understand what is going on around them, they can give us fresh interpretations.  But again, I usually come back to the cynical position that we are not actually seeing things through the child's lens of confusion and wonder, but rather from the artificial construct of that lens by the author.  I don't know, maybe that doesn't bother other people.  Maybe I need to get over it.

Anyway, rant against pseudo-childlike insight aside, I just didn't think that this was Gardam's best work.  Margaret Marsh, the young girl protagonist, reminded me a little bit of surly Mary Lennox from The Secret Garden, but without the eventual sunny breakthrough.  Her mother has just had a baby, and Margaret is disgusted both by the infant and her mother's obvious infatuation with him.  Because of the baby, though, Mrs. Marsh decides that Margaret deserves a special treat each week, as a solace for the reduction in motherly attention.  The treat takes the form of trips to the seaside with the Marsh's servant-girl, Lydia.  While the Marshes are strict and upright Christians, particularly fanatical Mr. Marsh, Lydia plays up her sensuality with tight satin dresses and speaks coarse Cockney English.  Margaret begins a period of growth and change on these day-trips, first in the exposure to some kind of sexual relationship between Lydia and a gardener on an old estate, and then through her experience at the estate itself.  Unsupervised while Lydia conducts her love affair, Margaret wanders onto the private property and its strange denizens.  At this point in the story, perspectives begin to open up and we learn that the estate begins to Rosalie Frayling, now a mummified old woman, who has opened up the house and grounds to mental patients.  Unbeknownst to either Margaret or Rosalie, Mrs. Marsh was once engaged to be married to Rosalie's son, but the affair was quashed by Rosalie's outrage at the idea of her son abasing himself to marry the daughter of the postman.  Meanwhile, Mrs. Marsh decides to reconnect with this son, who has moved back into the village.  How these pieces all come together in a fairly natural way demonstrates Gardam's sure hand with plot.

Gardam is also a beautiful writer, and she does justice to the setting as well as the complex emotional lives of her characters.  In the end though, I wasn't fully moved by the characters.  Blame my irrational hatred of child protagonists, if you want.  But I'd pick up Old Filth or Man in the Wooden Hat first.

The Leopard by Giuseppe di Lampedusa: Review

This is one of the must-reads that I came across in my days of post-college malaise, when I figured that the only thing that could give my life meaning would be to continue my Great Books education and read every obscure classic that I could get my hands on. Luckily I decided to continue my education more officially soon thereafter and thus was spared too many more angsty moments, but I'm pleased that one result of those wrought days spent reading book reviews and then browsing used books stores is that I heard about The Leopard by Giuseppe di Lampedusa. The book is translated from the Italian and was published posthumously in 1958. It tells the story of Don Fabrizio Corbera, Prince of Salina at the time of the Risorgimento, or Italian unification. Lampedusa was himself a titled aristocrat, and resigned wistfulness seems to be a predominant theme of the book.

I was watching the PBS miniseries Downton Abbey right at the time when I picked up The Leopard. Both the show and the novel depict societies on the brink of major, perhaps inevitable, upheaval: England just prior to World War I, and Italy in the 1860s. While Downton Abbey gives a fascinating picture of life both above and below stairs and the anxieties and hopes faced by all parties, The Leopard primarily explores the complex emotions of those at the top.

Don Fabrizio, though, seems more accepting of the change he sees coming with the landing of Garibaldi. This acceptance (which is arguably more like resignation), seems to come from a conversation he has with his nephew, Tancredi. Tancredi is both a force of change and also a sign of the limits of transformation. Though an aristocrat, has chosen to join Garibaldi's forces. His decision initially shocks and upsets the Prince, but Tancredi responds, "They will foist a republic on us. If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change."

This very pragmatic approach to revolution ferments in the Prince's mind, and he begins to dwell on the certain sameness that underlies all human interaction and politics. Later, at his estate in Donnafugata, he thinks, in depression:

All this shouldn't last; but it will, always; the human 'always,' of course, a century, two centuries...and after that it will be different, but worse. We were the Leopards, the Lions; those who take our place will be little jackals, hyenas; and the whole lot of us, Leopards, jackals, and sheep, we'll all go on thinking ourselves the salt of the earth.

What seems unique is his willingness to admit that the way of the Leopard and the Lion is no more right or justified than the way of the hyena and jackal, and he undermines his very assertion that things will be "worse" by assuring us in the next line that every last being will go on thinking that their way is the best.

I have had a long standing argument with my husband and father-in-law about whether the state of man and the world is constantly improving or simply cycling through highs and lows. I tend to believe the latter, which might be part of why this book appealed to me. The thing is, someone's high is usually someone else's low (from the personal to the global scale). Don Fabrizio is prescient because he realizes that his loss of power is simply someone else's gain. Of course happiness is not necessarily a zero-sum game, but many of the things that people think accompany or support happiness sometimes are--power, money, prestige, resources, etc.

I'm probably making this book sound a little more grim than it actually is. But though this story isn't about the promise of change, it's also not about it's devastation--it's more the often humerous exploration of the realities of transition, often so very mundane. The author, himself the last Prince of Lampedusa, must have understood this particularly well.

The Glass Room by Simon Mawer: Review

I admit that I picked this book up because it was sitting on the "Free Book" table outside of my office and was persuaded to read it because it was a Booker finalist in 2009 (and thus a candidate for Complete Booker inclusion!). It is another of the seemingly endless stream of books written about World War II and its lead-up and aftermath. Admittedly, this is a time period with amazing narrative potential; nearly every major country in the world has its own story to tell.

This particular book centers around the story of a Czech couple who begin their life together in the late 1920s. I am personally fascinated with this period and the literature produced both within and about it--there is a certain pleasurable omniscient doom that comes with reading about that period before the Second World War went and made a mockery of the First World War's claims to be "Great." Liesel and Viktor Landauer are confident in their future and the improvements that are sure to come, and they make this hope manifest in the designing and building of their dream home. They hire a visionary architect, von Abt, to design a space free of all ornamentation, a house that will liberate them from all of the hindrances of the past. In an early conversation, Viktor and von Abt discuss the value of modern over neo-Gothic architecture. Von Abt says the true ideal is the Japanese house of paper, which does not injure its inhabitants if it happens to fall down. But here is the novel's central problem: how do you move from houses of stone to houses of paper, from the old to the new, without people getting crushed in the process?

Viktor and Liesel see their home as its own revolution. They "watched their future world growing around them and they thought that it was a kind of perfection, the finest instrument for living." But quickly the reader understands that the glass walls of the house give only a false sense of transparency.

They crowd into the space of the Glass Room like passengers on the observation deck of a luxury liner. Some of them maybe peering out through the windows onto the pitching surface of the city, but, in their muddle of Czech and German, almost all of ignorant of the cold outside and the gathering storm clouds, the first sigh of the tempest that is coming.

This counterfeit safety is revealed first in Viktor and Liesel's relationship and then slowly through their entire world. Viktor is Jewish and Liesel Christian, and though Viktor begins to understand their vulnerability as the Nazis cut a wider and wider swath, Liesel maintains her belief in invisible lines. "The story is there, not here" she says, "It is over the border in another country, another world, another universe." Of course, those borders reveal themselves to be as fragile as glass.

Mawer's book convincingly explores these large ideas, though at times his personification of the Glass Room begins to grate. Ultimately, it is the inhumanity of the house that seems significant. Viktor believes that the value of the house lies in the fact that "there are no disturbing curves to upset the rectilinear austerity of the space. There is nothing convolute, involute, awkward, or complex." In other words, there is no life. The house is just an object, a modern statement that becomes a relic by the book's close. The people, the living, continue to struggle on.


*If anyone is interested in seeing the real "Landauer House", actually the Villa Tugendhat in Brno, Czech Republic, click here.

Complete Booker Introduction

Cross-post from The Complete Booker blog:

I'm new to this world of book blogs, so I thought that the organizing principle of a reading challenge would be helpful! By very unofficial accounting, I think I've enjoyed Booker winners and nominees more than those of other prizes, so I thought this would be a great place to start. I have an MA in English Literature and am currently working in academic administration, so I miss the formal contact with reading and writing. Yes, I'm the kind of person who thrills to the sight of a good syllabus.

Booker winner/nominees that I've read:
The Sea, the Sea by Irish Murdoch (1978 winner)
Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie (1981 winner)
Hotel du Lac by Anita Brookner (1984 winner)
Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes
The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie*
The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro (1989 winner)
Jigsaw by Sybille Bedford*
Possession by A.S. Byatt* (1990 winner)
The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields
A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy (1997 winner)
Amsterdam by Ian McEwan (1998 winner)
Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee (1999 winner)
English Passengers by Matthew Kneale
Atonement by Ian McEwan
Life of Pi by Yann Martel (2002 winner)
Unless by Carol Shields
Fingersmith by Sarah Waters*
The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst (2004 winner)
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell*
The Master by Colm Toibin
The Sea by John Banville (2005 winner)
Arthur and George by Julian Barnes*
The Accidental by Ali Smith
On Beauty by Zadie Smith
The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai* (2006 winner)
The Night Watch by Sarah Waters
The Gathering by Anne Enright (2007 winner)
Wolf Hall by Hillary Mantel* (2009 winner)

*favorite

On my list of Booker winners/nominees to read this year:
1. God on the Rocks by Jane Gardam (1978 shortlist)- I just love everything she writes. The Man in the Wooden Hat was one of the best books I read last year.
2. Oscar and Lucinda (1988 winner) or Parrot and Olivier in America (2010 shortlist) by Peter Carey--I've never read any Carey and it seems about time I should start. Any recommendations?
3. Amongst Women by John Gahern (1990 shortlist)-I read a glowing review of this somewhere this year, after which I put in a bit of (failed) effort tracking it down at the library. This year I will prevail!
4. The Conservationist by Nadine Gordimer (1974 winner)--Another author I've always meant to read, especially after living in South Africa (well, Lesotho) for a year.
5. In a Strange Room by Damon Galgut (2010 shortlist)--This is another Lesotho-influenced selection, as the protagonist travels through Lesotho in one of the stories. Most people can't pronounce the country's name, much less write about it, so I'm very interested to see what Galgut has to say about this desolate and remote little enclave.
6. The Glass Room by Simon Mawer (2009 shortlist)--To be honest, this is a pick because I found it in the "free book" pile that sits outside of our department office. It does look good, though.
7. The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters (2009 shortlist)--I've really enjoyed the Sarah Waters books I've read, so I might overcome my aversion to anything that tends to make me frightened to be in my apartment alone at night.

2011

Oh, the predictability of beginning the new year with resolutions and good intentions. But here I am, starting a blog and hoping that there is some magic dividing line between one year and the next! The goal here is to be a little more thoughtful and intentional about my reading and to force myself to write something--anything! After the flurry of graduate school and teaching, I am finding that I actually--dare I say it?--miss the idea of required reading. Reading "for fun" is wonderful and liberating, but I want to push myself a bit. So, in the spirit of resolution, I decided to sign up for some reading challenges (idea courtesy of Laura Miller at Salon). I'll be trying to post reviews of these books here as I read them.

Shakespeare Reading Challenge: How have I not read King Lear? I'm hoping that promising to read four Shakespeare plays this year will help me atone for the fact that this "Master" of English has a pretty threadbare knowledge of Shakespeare. Plus, one of the four can be substituted for a performance--perhaps R will again have one too many and order season tickets to the Shakespeare Theater?

The Complete Booker Challenge: Reading at least six Booker Prize winners or nominees. I have really enjoyed the Booker winners I've read in the past--Wolf Hall, The Inheritance of Loss, The Line of Beauty--and I'm interested in reading some of the short-list candidates as well.

Foodie's Reading Challenge: The perfect way to combine reading and cooking! I'm going to go with the "Gourmet" level of 10-12 books here, as cookbooks count and I have an unhealthy obsession growing on my shelves...

Chunkster Reading Challenge: An old wish-list for Santa requests "Lots of Fat Books". I think I was about 8, but some tastes never change. I'm going to try for six books over 450 pages long.

To 2011!