Linda92007's Reading for 2012: Part 1

Happy New Year everyone! I’m Linda, live in the Capital Region of New York State, and have a wonderful partner and two grown stepsons. I hold an MSW and am recently retired from a 36-year career in public human services delivery and administration. Having left long workdays and a long commute behind, I am looking forward to more active participation in Library Thing. My interests lie primarily in literary fiction, biographies, memoirs, travel and other narrative nonfiction, with the occasional mystery or other enticement.

I am looking forward to my first year with the 75ers and hope you will stop by and visit! l apologize in advance for some stumbling around while I learn how forum features like touchstones work.

Since I did no tracking, the following is my best effort (although likely incomplete) to reconstruct my reading for 2011. Those starred were particular favorites. Continued in the next message with my non-fiction reads.

Fiction:
*Desert by J. M. G. Le Clezio
*Ethan Frome by Wharton, Edith
*Great House by Nicole Krauss
*Matterhorn by Marlantes, Karl
*Rumors of Rain by Andre Brink
*The Bishop's Man: A Novel by MacIntyre, Linden
*The Blackwater Lightship by Colm Toibin
*The Cloud Atlas by Callanan, Liam
*The Darling by Banks, Russell
*The Farming of Bones by Danticat, Edwidge
*The Surrendered by Lee, Chang-rae
*The Wandering Falcon by Ahmad, Jamil
*Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
*The Time of the Angels by Murdoch, Iris
Backlash: a Novelette by Fulda, Nancy
Brothers of Gwynedd: Sunrise in the West (Book 1) by Pargeter, Edith
Caribou Island by Vann. David
Clouds of Witness by Sayers, Dorothy Leigh
Son of the Wind (published as Daniel in US) by Mankell, Henning
Going Wrong by Rendell, Ruth
Hecuba by Euripides
In the Forest: A Novel by O’Brien, Edna
Intuition: A Novel by Goodman, Allegra
Light at Dusk by Gadol, Peter
The Man from Beijing by Mankell, Henning
Red April: A Novel by Roncagliolo, Santiago
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan
The Help by Stockett, Kathryn
The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer
The People of the Mist by Haggard, Henry Rider
The Portrait of a Lady by James, Henry
The Turn of the Screw by James, Henry
Thirteen Hours by Meyer, Deon
Three Day Road by Boyden, Joseph
Whose Body? by Sayers, Dorothy Leigh
Winter Sea by Kearsley, Susanna
The Golden Mean by Lyon, Annabel
44 Scotland Street by Smith, Alexander McCall

Here are the rest of my reads for 2011. The touchstones did not seem to want to work with it all in one list.

Non-Fiction :
*Arabian Sands by Wilfred Thesiger
*An African in Greenland by Kpomassie, Tete-Michel
*In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin by
Larson, Erik
*The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Quest for What Makes Us Human by
Ramachandran, V.S.
*The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam by
Griswold, Eliza
*This Cold Heaven: Seven Seasons in Greenland by Ehrlich, Gretel
*Travels in Siberia by Frazier, Ian
*When a Crocodile Eats the Sun: a Memoir of Africa by Godwin, Peter
A Little Journey Higher by Ford, Alex
Here Be Monsters: 50 Days Adrift at Sea by Finkel, Michael (Kindle Single)
Running in the Family by Ondaatje, Michael
The Getaway Car: A Practical Memoir About Writing and Life by Patchett, Ann
(Kindle Single)
Wanderlust: a Love Affair With Five Continents by Eaves, Elisabeth

The following are my 2012 completed reads.

January
1. Brothers of Gwynedd: The Legend of the First True Prince of Wales by Edith Pargeter – Book 2
2. Ghost: A Novel by Alan Lightman
3. The Sweet Hereafter by Russell Banks
4. The Stranger's Child by Alan Hollinghurst
5. Slavery By Another Name by Douglas A. Blackmon
6. Ahead of Time: My Early Years as a Foreign Correspondent by Ruth Gruber

February
7. The Broken Word by Adam Foulds
8. Black Rain by Masuji Ibuse
9. The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson
10. The Writer as Migrant by Ha Jin

March
11. The Birds Fall Down by Rebecca West
12. Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! by Kenzaburo Oe
13. Troubles by J. G. Farrell
14. The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival by John Vaillant

April
15. Cloudsplitter by Russell Banks
16. Human Chain by Seamus Heaney (poetry)
17. Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney by Dennis O'Driscoll
18. To A Mountain In Tibet by Colin Thubron
19. Fishing the Sloe-Black River by Colum McCann

May
20. The Sadness of the Samurai: A Novel by Victor del Arbol
21. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

June
22. Eternity on Hold by Mario Susko (poetry)
23. The War Works Hard by Dunya Mikhail (poetry)
24. The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist by Orhan Pamuk
25. Mentors, Muses & Monsters by Elizabeth Benedict
26. blue has no south by Alex Epstein
27. The Hunger Angel by Herta Muller

Reserved for 2012 reading - 3rd quarter

Reserved for 2012 reading - 4th quarter

Welcome, Linda! I also like reading biographies and memoirs. Looking forward to seeing what you will be reading this year.

Sandy K

Welcome! Glad you decided to join us.

FYI, we've added a couple of wikis to the mix this year. The first is where we keep important threads. The second is the Threadbook where we have a directory to all the members' threads. Both help keep a handle on the chaos! :)

Welcome to the challenge!

I'm looking forward to picking up lots of reading suggestions from you, Linda. It seems we have similar interests, genre-wise.

Welcome to the group, Linda!

Welcome, Linda! I look forward to following your reading!

Thank you all for welcoming me to the group. I have added my 2011 reading in messages 2 and 3 above and with some effort, even succeeded in getting all of the touchstones to work (I think...).

Welcome to the 75ers, Linda. Another Linda...yay!! Lots of friendly people around here.

About half of my reading is mystery fiction-related but the other half is mainly nonfiction. For 2012, I'm aiming to read more literary fiction. Quite a few of your 2011 reads are those I hope to get to this year, such as In the Garden of Beasts.

I don't usually plan my reads in any organized way. But I try to attend as many of the NYS Writers Institute (University at Albany) events as I am able, and when possible like to have read something by the featured authors. In early February, I plan to attend a talk by Douglas A. Blackmon. My first non-fiction read for 2012 will be his 2009 Pulitzer Prize/2008 American Book Award winner Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II.

I am also currently reading Russell Bank’s The Sweet Hereafter and Black Rain by Masuji Ibuse.

Although I am trying to cut down on buying books by using the library more, I do plan to purchase The Orphan Master’s Son: A Novel of North Korea by Adam Johnson, as soon as it is out next week. I will read that next, as Johnson will present at the Writers Institute in February.

>14 lindapanzo: Hi Linda. Thanks for the welcome.

Slavery by Another Name is an excellent book! Black Rain is very good too. Looks like you have some terrific reading going on right now, Linda.

Thanks for stopping by, Stasia. I don't know how you manage to visit everyone like you do. The sheer volume in this group is a bit overwhelming, especially for a newbie like me. I stopped by your profile page and used the link there to get to your thread. Almost fell out of my chair when I saw that it was your 18th for the year ... until I realized it was for 2011!

Yeah, I have not started a thread for 2012 yet. I will be starting one this Sunday.

It's a cold and windy day, so good for catching up with LT. I finished three books this week.

The Brothers of Gwynedd Quartet by Edith Pargeter -I finished Volume 2, but will hold off on a review until I have completed the full quartet.

Ghost: A Novel by Alan Lightman

The Sweet Hereafter by Russell Banks

Ghost: A Novel by Alan Lightman

Ghost: A Novel is the story of David, a divorced, recently unemployed man who accepts a temporary position at a mortuary, where he sees what he believes to be a supernatural event, described as a “vapor” entering or leaving a body. When word gets out, he becomes subjected to unwanted media attention and is drawn into a public controversy between a society of believers, who seek to demonstrate that he has special powers, and members of the academic community intent on disproving this.

This was a quick, unexpectedly light read that was enjoyable primarily in the flow of its language and the author’s creation of a strong sense of anticipation. However, I had mixed feelings and found it ultimately disappointing, as the characters and plot lacked depth. The main character struck me as insipid, with the owner of the mortuary, Martin, being of more interest. I also found the story line to be shallow and predictable. This book has been described by others as a compelling examination of the tug and pull between the supernatural and science and one man’s struggle to come to terms with his beliefs. However, I found this aspect of the novel to fall far short of this assessment. Rather, it spoke more strongly to me as a story of how an unexplained experience, subject to an unwarranted level of public view, can impact one’s life well beyond the significance of the event itself.

Alan Lightman is both a theoretical physicist and a novelist, perhaps best know for several earlier works: Einstein’s Dreams, an international best seller, and The Diagnosis, a finalist for the National Book Award. Given these credentials, I expected much more of this novel, the first of his works that I have read. However, Lightman is clearly a writer with some talent and I am not inclined to dismiss him on the basis of this one book alone. I plan to attend a talk that he will give in early February, after which I will decide whether to invest time in reading another of his books.

The Sweet Hereafter by Russell Banks

The Sweet Hereafter tells the story of a school bus accident that occurs on a snowy morning in Sam Dent, an impoverished, rural Adirondack community. The accident and its aftermath are told through the voices of four characters, each of whom has suffered prior losses that ultimately determine their response to the accident, as they attempt to cope in isolation with the inevitable questions of cause, blame and how to move on with life.

The novel opens and closes with the voice of the school bus driver, Dolores Driscoll, a respected, life-long resident of the community whose days revolves around the care of her wheelchair bound husband and her responsibilities for the children she transports. Billy Ansel is a Vietnam veteran and widowed father of twins, who is haunted by unrelenting grief following his wife’s death. Mitchell Stephens, Esq., is a big city attorney who specializes in negligence litigation against government agencies and large corporations, driven by anger against the societal forces he blames for the estrangement of his drug-addicted daughter. Nichole Burnell, a popular and beautiful cheerleader, secretly struggles to cope with parental abuse and dysfunctional family relationships.

The Sweet Hereafter reflects on the reactions of ordinary people in times of personal tragedy. The setting and events of the novel are masterfully described. Banks presents his characters as fully realized individuals, whose inner thoughts and emotions are readily familiar to us, yet become extraordinary in their articulation. And while the aftermath of such an accident would be easily predicted in our litigious society, the reactions of Banks’ characters are at the same time both ordinary and unanticipated. Blame, guilt, grief, greed, anger and the underlying power of family and community come together in an unexpected conclusion. The humanity of the choices made by the characters in The Sweet Hereafter will stay with me for a long while.

Russell Banks is one of my favorite authors and I highly recommend The Sweet Hereafter. High on my TBR list is also Cloudsplitter, his fictionalized account of the abolitionist John Brown, which I plan to follow by reading Tony Horwitz’s non-fiction account in Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War.

Interesting reviews, Linda. I will be looking out for Russell Banks now.

Great review, Linda! Unfortunately, my library does not have either The Sweet Hereafter or Cloudsplitter, so they have been added to the ever-growing wishlist.

Soupdragon and rosalita - Thanks for stopping by! I do hope you have the chance to read some Russell Banks. The only one of his that I have read and didn't care for was The Reserve.

The Stranger’s Child by Alan Hollinghurst

Since this novel has been much reviewed and discussed on the Booker Prize threads, I will only briefly add my thoughts.

The Stranger’s Child, long-listed for the 2010 Booker Prize, is the saga of members of England's upper middle-class, literary community. Beginning in 1913 with the visit of Cecil Valance to the home of his friend, George Sawle, the story focuses upon Cecil’s identity as an emerging poet and the intimate relationships he forms with both George and his sister, Daphne Sawle. The narrative moves through five periods of time, from 1913 to 2008, recounting Cecil’s death in combat, the subsequent marriages and aging of Daphne and George, and the efforts of a biographer to uncover the secrets of their relationships.

I found The Stranger’s Child to be an enjoyable read, although not one that made me think much or introduced me to anything new. The author was adept in his use of language, description of the period and setting, and development of characters. Parallels and contrasts were subtly drawn between historical periods, principally regarding attitudes towards open homosexual relationships. Other interesting themes included the limitations of one’s ability to truly know another person and the difficulties of accurately reconstructing the story of an individual’s life.

Towards the end, I found myself wondering what Hollinghurst was trying to convey in closing, as the plot trailed off in a vague and inconclusive manner - for me, perhaps the greatest failing of this novel. ***1/2

I just finished The Stranger's Child myself, Linda. I'm sorry to say I didn't care for it as much as you did, but I guess that's why there are so many different books in the world!

Julia, I just popped over to your thread and read your review of The Stranger's Child. While I did enjoy the book overall, I do agree with you that the most interesting characters were those introduced early on. And while I wasn't bothered by the jumps in period, I did also think the story trailed off as it progressed.

I see that you are now reading The Sense of an Ending, which is another from last year's Booker Prize that I plan to read soon, as I can get the ebook version through the library. I will be interested in seeing your thoughts on that also.

Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II by Douglas A. Blackmon

The years following the Civil War did not bring an end to the subjugation of African Americans in the southern states. Rather, slavery was replaced by a system of forced labor that by some measures was equally or even more cruel and dehumanizing, ending only with the advent of World War II. Slavery by Another Name won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize and is a powerful book that chronicles a period in southern history that is not widely known or acknowledged today.

The end of slavery left the southern states in social and economic crisis, with the plantation system severely disrupted by war and loss of its labor force. Newly freed African Americans were suddenly thrust into a world where they struggled to establish themselves as equals and to find ways of supporting themselves. Yet racial attitudes of whites towards blacks remained virtually unchanged, and the white supremacist mores and traditions underlying slavery were slow to dismantle.

“As the United States would learn many times in the ensuing 150 years, a military victor’s intention to impose a new moral and political code on a conquered society was much easier to wish for than to attain.”

Blackmon traces the widespread development of a system of peonage (i.e. forced labor to pay a debt) that replaced slavery as a source of cheap labor, in order to drive the industrial and agricultural economies, while continuing a culture of white supremacy. Under this system, African Americans were arrested for all manner of minor and non-existent offenses, of which they were invariably found guilty by local judges. In lieu of incarceration, fees were imposed upon the guilty party and paid for by companies, businessmen and farmers, who in turn obtained rights to the prisoner’s labor until their debt was repaid. Through this system, countless blacks were imprisoned and forced to work in deplorable conditions, far worse than those experienced under slavery. Their new “owners” lacked the motivation of slaveholders to protect their “investment”. Laborers were often punished harshly and many were ultimately worked to death. Their original crimes of vagrancy, gambling, riding the rails, talking loudly near white women and even eavesdropping effectively became death sentences.

Efforts to legally intervene in this system met with only limited success, as cases were ruled as falling under the jurisdiction of the local and State courts, which directly benefited financially from the system and argued that peonage was not a crime. In fact, the 13th amendment to the U.S. Constitution, adopted in 1865 to abolish slavery, did specifically allow for involuntary servitude as punishment for those convicted of criminal offenses. The control exercised by white sheriffs, judges, mayors and State officials in continuing and expanding this system was nearly absolute. Few whites were ultimately prosecuted and those convictions that were obtained resulted in only minor fines. Almost incomprehensible is that in the entire State of Georgia during the period 1877–1966, only one white man was found guilty of murdering a black man.

With few exceptions, federal authorities, including even presidents and U. S. attorneys general, lacked the will or interest to confront this issue and largely ignored those complaints that they received. Definitive federal action to put an end to peonage was taken only following President Roosevelt’s awareness, in the early days of World War II, that our nation’s enemies would exploit the shameful and violent manner in which America treated its black citizens. A new federal willingness to investigate and prosecute ensued and the legalized slavery being practiced under the guise of peonage was finally brought to an end in 1945.

“It was a strange irony that after seventy-four years of hollow emancipation, the final delivery of African Americans from overt slavery and from the quiet complicity of the federal government in their servitude was precipitated only in response to the horrors perpetrated by an enemy country against its own despised minorities.”

Slavery by Another Name is richly detailed, thoroughly researched, and supported by numerous references and documented instances. Interspersed throughout the narrative are the stories of individuals, both black and white, that put a human face to the events. Since reading this book, I have found myself struggling to reconcile how this could have happened in my country as recently as the 1940s, yet not be taught in schools or openly discussed in other forums.

This book is a must read for those seeking to understand the forces that have shaped and continue to impact on racial relations in our nation. *****

Note that a documentary of the same title, based on Blackmon’s Slavery by Another Name, is scheduled to air on PBS on February 13th.

Linda, thanks for taking the time to read my review of The Stranger's Child. It sounds like we actually agree more than we disagree — I must have just been in a crankier mood when I wrote mine. :)

I still don't know what we were meant to think about that ending. It's a real puzzler.

I haven't had a chance to start The Sense of an Ending yet, but it's on tap this weekend. I've read so many good things about it, I'm really looking forward to it.

Ahead of Time: My Early Years as a Foreign Correspondent by Ruth Gruber

In Ahead of Time: My Early Years as a Foreign Correspondent, Ruth Gruber recounts her first twenty-five years, including her early development as a writer and foreign correspondent. Born in 1911 Brooklyn to Jewish immigrant parents, from an early age Gruber exhibited an independence and intellectual curiosity far beyond expectations for females of the time. Opportunity to escape her tradition-bound future presented itself when she was granted a fellowship to pursue doctoral studies at the University of Cologne in Germany. It was here that she began achievement of a series of “firsts”. At age 20, she became the youngest person in the world to receive a Ph.D., all the more notable for being granted by a German institution to a Jewish American, during a period when Hitler and the Nazi party were building their power. In an increasingly dangerous political climate, Gruber placed herself at personal risk with a return trip to Europe, Germany, Poland and Russia under a fellowship for “creative research”, to study women living under fascism, communism and democracy. Her travels during this period ended with two trips to the Soviet Arctic, where she became the first foreign correspondent to visit and interview both officials and gulag inmates.

This early memoir was first published in 1991, many years later than the events that Gruber describes. During the intervening years, she was deeply involved with the plight of Jewish refugees, both as an official of the federal government and as a writer and humanitarian. It is therefore surprising that she does not delve more deeply into the growing Nazi threat that she observed or the conditions encountered in the Soviet gulags. Although she describes the fears of her Jewish friends and relates having witnessed some frightening events, Gruber seems to have felt distanced from the danger by her American passport. Her writing reflects this distance, seeming to lack the sense of immediacy and apprehension I expected from a witness to alarming world events. While I enjoyed this interesting book by a remarkable woman, I can’t help but feel that Gruber missed an opportunity to make it so much more.
***1/2

The Broken Word: An Epic Poem of the British Empire and the Mau Mau Uprising Against It by Adam Foulds

The Broken Word by Adam Foulds is a narrative poem set during the Mau Mau uprising against British colonial rule in 1950’s Kenya. A young British colonist, Tom, returns from England on school vacation to his family’s estate just as the conflict encroaches. Tom is volunteered by his father to join the settlers’ Home Guard, where he is exposed to and eventually participates in gruesome acts of torture and killing of captive rebels. His response gradually transforms from naiveté to ambivalence to persistent fascination with brutality, inexplicably accompanied by feelings of respect for the strong, defiant rebels. Lurid visions of violence continue to intrude even as he returns to England, disturbing his efforts to reestablish a normal life.

The Broken Word is an astonishing and unsettling work. Foulds uses a straightforward style of verse and language to portray how a young man on the verge of adulthood is changed by immersion in a world of violence and fear. As a fictionalized account of a murderous conflict, it does not contain the elements of heroic acts that its subtitle as an epic poem would imply, but rather presents an ugly, yet complex depiction of human behavior. I found myself frequently startled by the progression of events, as Foulds skillfully reveals the emerging violent impulses that become part of Tom’s moral character, while at the same time offering glimpses into his underlying humanity.

The Broken Word won the 2008 Costa Poetry Award and the 2009 Somerset Maugham Award, and was shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. At 61 pages, it is a fast, gripping read that begs to be immediately re-read for nuance. I highly recommend this award-winning poem.
*****

I completely agree with your glowing review of The Broken Word, Linda.

Thanks Darryl. Only 30 LT members include it in their libraries and ours are the only 2 reviews. I am surprised, as this is a work that deserves more attention! Have you read either of his novels? Apparently this is his only published work of poetry, but hopefully there will be more in the future.

Yes, I read The Quickening Maze after it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2009, and I liked it. I haven't read and don't own his debut novel, The Truth About These Strange Times.

Some really excellent reading Linda. I am as you an admirer of Russell Banks and want to read Cloudsplitter this year if I get the time.

BTW what is public services human delivery?

Starred from now on - so you are wrong you are on my stats already!

Thanks for stopping by Paul. I have actually just started Cloudsplitter and hope to follow it with Tony Horwitz's nonfiction account, Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War, which I also own. I have seen both Russell Banks and Tony Horwitz give talks and they were both very engaging speakers.

Public human services are financial assistance and service programs funded, administered and operated by government. In NYS, most of the service delivery happens on the county level. I have a Masters in Social Work and was employed by the County Department of Social Services for 36 years, involved mostly with child protective services, domestic violence services, homeless housing and prevention, adult protective services, home care and other long-term care for the elderly and disabled. I started fresh out of undergraduate school as a child protective worker, which was an incredible learning experience but very stressful. I ended up hanging around for the duration, but mostly in planning, grant writing, program development and administration.

Thanks for that Linda - My sister whom I have a rollercoaster relationship with is a lawyer specialising in domestic violence and child protective matters back "home" in West Yorks, England. She is something of a pit-bull and very courageous in her protection and defence of some of the poor kids that come under her care - an important job and a difficult one for both of you.

Black Rain by Masuji Ibuse

In his beautifully written novel, Black Rain, Masuji Ibuse takes us into the experience of ordinary citizens coping with the after-math of the August 6, 1945 bombing of Hiroshima. Set several years following the bombing, Shigematsu Shizuma, his wife Shigeko and niece Yasuko, temporarily residing in Hiroshima at the time of the blast, have survived and returned to their rural community of Kobatake. Acting as their niece’s guardians, Shigematsu and his wife are responsible to find her a husband, a duty that is rendered difficult by potential suitors’ fears that Yasuko has been exposed to the “black rain”. Shigematsu struggles himself with a mild case of radiation sickness, yet continues his factory employment, while joining friends in establishing a carp nursery. Throughout the story, recollections of the bombing and its aftermath are intermingled with the family’s concerns for every day life.

Ibuse advances his narrative in multiple voices, through an inventive use of four characters’ journal entries that move the story back and forth between the present day and the time of the bombing. Shigematsu dominates through transcription of his journal entries, from the day of the bombing to the day of the Imperial Majesty’s surrender, the copying of which he has undertaken both for donation to the school library and to disprove his niece’s illness. The first person perspectives of Shigeko, Yasuko and a physician, Dr. Iwatake, are brought in through their own personal journal entries. In writing this novel, Ibuse drew heavily from actual materials and interviews, and we are told in the preface that Shigematsu, his journal, and Dr. Iwatake actually existed.

Ibuse details the horror of the utter devastation and death that occurred in the aftermath of the bombing, with his writing made even more powerful by the absence of political commentary or overt emotionalism. The characters display remarkable emotional reserve and resilience, and struggle to continue on with their lives and traditional ceremonies, despite heart-wrenching encounters with death and suffering. Their lack of self-pity or hysteria, and initial incomprehension of the true nature and ramifications of the bomb, lends an almost eerie quality to the narrative.

Black Rain is one of few novels that I have read by a Japanese author and I found John Bester’s Translator’s Preface very helpful in understanding the ways in which it is uniquely Japanese. Bester’s insights into this brilliant work summarize its power far more elegantly than I ever could.

“…Ibuse, with infinite nostalgia, sets against the violent destruction of the city the beauty of the Japanese countryside and the ancient customs of its people. Against the mighty, brutal purposes of State, he lays the small human preoccupations and foibles. Against the threat of universal destruction, he sets a love for, and sense of wonder at life in all its forms…

Black Rain is a portrait of a group of human beings; of the death of a great city; of a nation crumbling into defeat. It is a picture of the Japanese mind that tells more than many sociological studies. Yet more than this, it is statement of a philosophy. Although that philosophy, in its essence, is neither pessimistic nor optimistic, it seems to me to be life-affirming. Dealing with the grimmest of subjects, the work is not, in the end, depressing, for the author is ultimately concerned with life rather than with death, and with an overall beauty that transcends ugliness of detail. In that sense, I would suggest, Black Rain is not a “book about the bomb” at all.”

Highly recommended. *****

The Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson

In The Orphan Master’s Son, Adam Johnson presents a fictionalized account of North Korea, as a country where the individual disappears and personal narrative is replaced by the Kim regime’s story of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) as the most democratic country on earth, operating under the benevolence of its Beloved Leader. This is the story of Jun Do and his quest to create an individual identity and in so doing, find love and family.

Jun Do grows up in a North Korean orphanage, believing himself to be the son of the Orphan Master. His parentage at best ambiguous, he effectively becomes an orphan when the Orphan Master inexplicably disappears. As a loyal, conforming citizen, the young Jun Do is trained as an Army tunnel rat, graduates to conducting kidnapping forays into Japan, learns English and gains a post as an intelligence officer monitoring foreign radio transmissions at sea. It is here that he first experiences a sense of freedom and contemplates a larger reality, while learning to survive by inventing versions of events that are acceptable to the government authorities. Following the defection of a fellow sailor, Jun Do alternates between suspect and hero. He is assigned to accompany a "diplomatic" team to Texas, where a misunderstanding with the Americans regarding his identity leads to his impersonation of Commander Ga, the Minister of Prison Mines and renowned military hero, whose wife is Sun Moon, a beautiful actress with personal ties to Kim Jong-Il. This impersonation becomes the driving force that carries the story to its conclusion.

Through his characters, Johnson portrays a citizenry that knows no reality other than the regime’s propaganda, and who struggle to suppress their own personal ideas and emotions in a society where any display of individuality can lead to imprisonment, brutal indoctrination and death. He shifts between first person and third person narration, moving back and forth across time. Jun Do’s story dominates the early part of the novel, with two first person voices introduced upon the “departure” of the Jun Do character. An ever-present propaganda broadcast addresses the Citizens with tales of Ga's heroics, while a nameless member of the Division 42 Interrogation Team is determined to break the imposter and obtain his confessional story, yet ultimately becomes the source of his final liberation.

At a recent seminar, Johnson described his techniques in this novel as mirroring the ways that trauma victims distance themselves from the pain of their own experiences, using fragmentation, lack of chronology, and the past tense to tell their tales. This is a book that is at the same time dark and humorous, full of both despair and hope. Yet despite its many moments of torture and death, I did not ultimately find this to be a dark book, although friends have disagreed with me on this assessment. Johnson’s narrative style provided me, like his trauma victims, with the needed distance from the harsh conditions portrayed. While it feels nearly inconceivable to me that the individual spirit could prevail under such tyrannical circumstances, Johnson shows us that this is indeed a possibility.
****1/2 Highly recommended.

Revised 2/17/12 to clarify that this review is presented solely in the context of a work of fiction.

Very thoughtful review.

Hi Linda, you keep popping up on others' threads so I thought I would pop over and welcome you to the 75ers. I am looking forward to reading The Orphan Master's Son. My name is slowly moving up the library reserve list.

I envy your proximity to the Writer's Institute. I try to take advantage of the few opportunities to meet real writers that come up here in Southwest Missouri. We aren't exactly a "hot spot" for culture here. ;-)

It looks like our reading tastes are similar. I've got your thread starred and look forward to following your reading life in 2012.

> 40 Thank you, Judy. I hope you'll visit again.

> 41 Thanks for stopping by and for the welcome, Donna. You show up as being high on my similar libraries list. I may not have posted yet, but I have lurked on your thread. This is my first year on the threads and I am trying to start getting around a bit. But the 75ers are somewhat overwhelming! I am managing to keep up better with Club Read and the Non-Fiction Journal groups.

I am very fortunate to live in an area where we have not only the NYS Writers Institute, but also other colleges that bring in world-class authors for events that are free and open to the public. I try to attend as many as possible. Just since last week I have seen Ha Jin, Teju Cole and Adam Johnson.

I feel a distant affinity for Missouri, as my mother was raised in the Springfield area and we used to drive down every August for our summer vacation. Five kids in a station wagon without air-conditioning, at the hottest time of the year! My closest relatives are still there and I have fond memories of our visits. I've been meaning to make it back down some day.

Excellent review of Black Rain, Linda. I'll add it to my wish list.

39: Excellent reviews of Black Rain and The Orphan Master's Son, and I've added both to the wishlist for... sometime... Really trying to stick to the US this year, and keep getting pulled in other interesting directions... I'd read another review of The Orphan Master's Son (in New Yorker maybe?) that wasn't so appealing, but I was on a North Korea thing last year, with Nothing to Envy and Pyongyang.

>43 kidzdoc: Thanks Darryl. I think you would enjoy it, although enjoy may not be the right word for such a serious work.

>44 qebo: Thanks Katherine. The Orphan Master's Son - or perhaps my, in retrospect, admittedly flawed comments and review - has prompted some interesting reaction over on my Club Read thread, much of it actually more relevant to narrative nonfiction, I think. Since you have read Nothing to Envy and Pyongyang (which received strongly worded reviews, yours included), I thought you might be interested. Here's the link to the thread. Just scroll down towards the bottom. Important things to think about.
www.librarything.com/topic/129926

Note that I have slightly revised my review of The Orphan Master's Son above (#39, although for some reason it shows as a second #38), feeling a responsibility to clarify that it is presented solely in the context of a work of fiction.

45: So many threads to keep track of... You ask two crucial questions over there. I have some thoughts in response, but I won't get them into sentences this evening, so probably over the weekend.

I'll look forward to hearing your thoughts, Katherine, if you get a chance.

Linda you foundtwo excellent reads in a row and reviewed both tremendously. Black Rain and The Orphan Master's Son both climbing the hitlist accordingly.

Thanks, Paul. Nice to see you again!

The Writer as Migrant by Ha Jin

Ha Jin’s The Writer as Migrant was not at all what I expected. I sought this book out after attending a recent lecture given by Ha Jin at Skidmore College. Himself a “migrant” writer, Ha Jin grew up in China during the time of the Cultural Revolution and as a teenager served in the People’s Liberation Army. While attending college on scholarship in the United States, he made the decision not to return to China following the Tiananmen Square incident. Originally a poet, his career as a novelist has flourished in the United States, where he has chosen to write in his non-native language of English.

The Writer as Migrant is a short volume, consisting of three Rice University 2006 Campbell Lectures that present various perspectives on the migrant writer’s identity, audience, choice of language and relationship to country of origin: “The Spokesman and the Tribe”, The Language of Betrayal” and “An Individual’s Homeland”. Despite his first-hand experience as an immigrant and exile, Ha Jin illustrates his viewpoints primarily by referencing the lives and works of other authors who left their native lands, including Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Lin Yutang, V.S. Naipaul, Vladimir Nabakov and Joseph Conrad.

Although Ha Jin does not directly address his own experiences, it is relatively easy to discern his views. As an author who did not return to his country of origin, Ha Jin argues that the writer’s physical return is not necessary in order to gain acceptance of his work, as “Only through literature is a genuine return possible for the exiled writer.” His discussion of choice of language feels very personal. He describes an author’s decision to write in a non-native language as often being seen as the ultimate betrayal of his native country. However, he presents convincing grounds for such a decision, concluding that great literature is universal.

“For the creation of literature, a language of synthesis is necessary to make sure that one’s work is more meaningful and more authentic. One principle of this language is translatability. In other words, if rendered into different languages, especially into the language spoken by the people the author writes about, the work still remains meaningful.”

Ha Jin’s principal theme is that in making crucial decisions, the migrant writer must resist various pressures and be guided only by the goal of staying true to his art.

“The writer should enter history mainly through the avenue of his art…Whatever role he plays, he must keep in mind that his success or failure as a writer will be determined only on the page. That is the space where he should strive to exist.”

This collection of lectures reads like the academic essays that they are and will likely appeal only to a limited audience. I found them interesting mostly for the way in which Ha Jin weaves the lives and works of various authors into his themes, choosing anecdotes that reveal something of their personalities. Although I was highly disappointed that he chose not to include examples from his own experiences and writing, I will bring to his books and those of the authors he discusses, a deeper appreciation of the challenges encountered by the non-native writer.
***1/2

Hi Linda! I just noticed your thread. Welcome to the group! I've starred it, since it looks like we have somewhat similar taste.

I've always wanted to read Russell Banks and I'm finally going to do it this month. I'm reading the new one though, because it fits into my 12 in 12 category challenge. However, I imagine a Russell Banks fan, like yourself, would probably recommend something else.

Thanks for the welcome, Kerri. And welcome to my thread!

I haven't read Banks' new book yet, so I will be interested in your opinion of it. I am myself currently reading and enjoying Cloudsplitter. I see you have this and The Darling, which I also liked, in your library. You have some great reading ahead! Banks is masterful in bringing his characters to life.

The Birds Fall Down by Rebecca West

Set in Europe during the early 1900s, Rebecca West’s story of Russian exiles and terrorist revolutionaries is told from the viewpoint of an eighteen-year old woman, who while strong and astute, suffers from the naiveté of having lived a protected and privileged life. Her father is an English Member of Parliament and an aloof, distant parent and her mother the indulged daughter of exiled Russian nobility. While visiting in Paris, she makes a trip with her grandfather, an imposing and deeply religious Russian Orthodox who remains fiercely loyal to his homeland and to the Tsar who has exiled him. They are approached on the train by a member of a Russian revolutionary terrorist group, from whom they learn the identity of an “agent provocateur” who plans terrorist attacks, then informs on his comrades to the Tsar’s secret police. Knowing this individual to be a close associate of her grandparents and fearing for her life, the young woman is drawn into acting as an accomplice to an assassination plan.

The Birds Fall Down was Rebecca West’s last work of fiction published during her lifetime. In the book’s foreword, West describes the story as being based on an actual historical incident and most of her characters as actual involved persons. While West does not reveal their identities or her sources, it is widely assumed that the novel was inspired by the activities of Yevno Azef, a Russian double agent who worked both for the Socialist Revolutionary Party and the Tsar’s Imperial Secret Police.

West’s characters are splendidly developed and her writing richly detailed and atmospheric, capturing the tradition-steeped lifestyle of Orthodox Russian exiles of privilege. While incorporating elements of psychological thriller, historical fiction, mystery and spy novel, this book in the end defies simple classification. West skillfully builds suspense throughout the story, but the ending lacks the unexpected and the reader is left with only the slightest of unresolved questions. The novel’s effectiveness as historical fiction is also limited, as only vague hints are provided of the significance of its events, explained in the foreword as paving the way for Lenin’s rise to power by undermining the terrorist wing of the Socialist Revolutionary Party. In my opinion, this novel succeeds best as a psychological thriller and portrait of an ideology and way of life lost to time, revolution and war. It was a pleasure to read, its details to be savored, and has left me interested in seeking other works by this author.

****

Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! by Kenzaburo Oe

“Father, father, where are you going
O do not walk so fast.
Speak father, speak to your little boy
Or else I shall be lost.“
-William Blake, Songs of Innocence

K is a famous Japanese author, residing in Tokyo with his wife and three children, and obsessed with the work of William Blake, the 18th century English poet and artist. His oldest son, Eeyore, is severely disabled, having had surgery as a child to remove a non-functioning second brain growing on the exterior of his skull. Eeyore is a musical savant, who as a child requires constant care and supervision, and becomes the focal point of the family’s life. As he develops and strives for greater independence, his behavior moves through disparate and unsettling periods of tenderness, engagement and withdrawal, defiance and physical aggression. K is a devoted father, who struggles with feelings of inadequacy and ambivalence, and turns to the work of Blake in an attempt to reconcile the realities of his life. Frustrated by the challenges of understanding and communicating with Eeyore, K sets out to explain the world to his disabled son by compiling a book of “definitions”, vignettes drawn from memories he associates with such words as feet, river, death, dream and violence.

This is a story of parent-child relationships and a father’s efforts to honor his own history and inner life, while facing overwhelming responsibilities for which he feels unprepared. It is the story of a profoundly disabled youth who struggles to form an independent identity and to interact with the world on his own terms. And it is the story of how one individual seeks to understand and impose meaning on his life through studying great works of literature and art.

The author reveals gradually that this is autobiographical fiction. Occasionally slipping into his own voice, Oe seamlessly merges his identity with that of the narrator, K. Although Eeyore is a fictionalized, more capable and communicative representation of his own disabled son, Oe seems to ultimately unite their identities, concluding the novel with Eeyore discarding his childish nickname in favor of Hiraki, his given name and that of Oe’s real life son.

Oe’s novel is also a tribute to the poetry and art of William Blake, whom he quotes and discusses extensively. In the final chapter, K describes the book as a “…chronicle of William Blake superimposed on my life with my son…”. I came to this book with little prior knowledge of Blake and have left it more curious, particularly regarding his art.

Kenzaburo Oe’s Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! is an unusual and challenging novel. There is no question that Oe is a skilled writer who brings a unique perspective to his fiction. When K is relating events from his own life and that of his family, the story is touching and universally relevant on both experiential and emotional levels. However, as the novel advanced, K’s digressions into discussion of William Blake became more dense, interrupting the flow of my reading. I hope eventually to return to this novel with a greater knowledge of Blake, as this seems necessary to its full appreciation.

4 Stars

55: I do _not_ need more books on the wishlist, but this one is awfully intriguing...

Linda- Great review of The Birds Fall Down. Sounds very intriguing. I had never heard of the book or the author. You cured that.

>56 qebo: Awww, Katherine. There's no harm in adding just_ one_ more....

>57 msf59: Thanks Mark. I heard of West through LT, of course. This was the first of hers I read, and I am now listening to a LibriVox recording of The Return of the Soldier, which is probably one of her better known works.

55: I enjoyed your very thoughtful review of Rouse Up O Young Men, Linda. I'm glad you went the extra mile and did some homework on Wm. Blake. I agree that this is the key to unlocking the full meaning and enjoyment of this novel. I also thought the Afterword was helpful in getting into the mind of this author. I plan to read more by Kenzaburo Oe...someday.

Thanks Donna. I agree that the Afterword was quite helpful. I think it is a book that also benefits from re-reading . The more I went back to review specific sections, the more I absorbed and appreciated what Oe was trying to convey, although I still fell short of grasping it all. I am jealous that you have a Book Club that reads this level of literature. While I do get to attend great author talks, I haven't found a group yet to discuss them with!

I am quite excited about the next few days. We have season tickets to a fabulous chamber music series and tonight Yefim Bronfman will be returning to perform sonatas by Haydn, Brahms and Prokofiev. He is not only a great pianist, but also generous with his encores and just seems to be having a great time. (I hate it when performers scowl at the audience like they are angry that you are there.)

Then tomorrow, two interesting author events. An afternoon Q&A type seminar with Masha Gessen (The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin) and an evening lecture by Colum McCann (Let the Great World Spin and others). I will try to post some follow-up comments over the weekend.

Linda- The author events sound terrific. I LOVED Let the Great World Spin and have been meaning to read some of his other works. Let us know.

>61 Linda92007: I'm hearing Bronfman on Saturday in NYC!

He participates in the Peoples' Symphony Concerts series, which is held in a nearby high school which happens to have a GREAT concert hall. The PSC has been offering several series of concerts for about 112 years, priced so that the working man and woman can hear great music, which means the prices are still ridiculously cheap. The seats - well, old wooden auditorium fold-downs. But not too great a burden to bear, considering.

Linda - Some great reading here - Kenzaburo Oe is a bit heavy going and deceptively so but the Rebecca West looks like great fun. How are you doing with Troubles?

The Oe sounds intriguing, and I'm adding it to my wishlist.

How wonderful that you have access to such an array of concerts, lectures and book events--are you near a university town?

Hi Linda, you write amazingly insightful reviews and I'm terribly jealous of your access to such formidable writers. Here in Buffalo we get some writers through the university but they are infrequent and never free or even low cost. I wonder what the secret is SUNY Albany? Anyway, lucky you.

I enjoyed Rebecca West's Return of the Soldier and you've intrigued me with The Birds Fall Down and also the Oe.

>62 msf59: Hi Mark. Colum McCann is an LT Author and there is an author chat with him from 2010 that I thought was very interesting. I am really looking forward to his talk tonight.

>63 ffortsa: Judy, we are both very fortunate to have access to such great performers at very inexpensive prices. For season ticket holders, our series works out to $10 a concert. Can't beat that in this area. Bronfman was fabulous last night. If he is playing the same program, the Prokofiev is great. I hope you enjoy it!

>64 PaulCranswick: Paul, according to my Kindle, I am 40% through Troubles. I'm not a particularly fast reader and have some other books in progress, so I'm glad I got a jump on things. I'm enjoying it, but feeling that I need to take a side-trip to learn more about the history of Ireland during the post-WWI period. I see that Suz has reactivated the group read thread, so you may want to head over there also.

>65 arubabookwoman: Deborah, thanks for stopping by. This is my first year on the threads and I love having new visitors. I am about a half hour from Albany, NY. We are very fortunate to live in a region with a State University, 5 colleges and a few community colleges, all of which have great offerings. When I was working, I never had the time to attend much. Now that I am retired, I am trying to take full advantage of things!

>66 brenzi: Bonnie, thank you so much for your kind words and for the visit. I work hard at the reviews and consider myself very much a novice compared to so many others on LT, so it's nice to get a vote of confidence!

I am surprised that the University of Buffalo would be charging for author talks. Although I have heard of a few bookstores in the area starting to do so, none of the colleges do. SUNY Albany's secret is that they have the NYS Writers Institute in the fall and spring. Skidmore College sponsors it during the summer. It was started by William Kennedy and he may have contributed to it financially. I'm not sure. But I am pretty certain that it receives some dedicated funding through the State budget. It is certainly an amazing resource and I feel very spoiled.

Hi Linda - We've overlapped on some threads and it turns out we share almost 200 books, so I thought I'd stop by and say hello! And here you are talking about Skidmore and SUNY Albany... I grew up in the Hudson Valley and my dad still lives in the area, just south of Albany in Columbia County. I don't get back to visit as much as I would like but it's a lovely area.

I look forward to following your reading this year!

>60 Linda92007:: I love my book group, Linda, but it's a bit uneven in what we read. April is "noir" month. We get to read any book in that genre to discuss with the group. That's the first time we've done something like that. My book is The Postman Always Rings Twice because that's the only book I have that even halfway fits the category. I think most of the group will be reading The Maltese Falcon which is the Springfield, MO, Big Read. Another head scratcher. Who chooses these books? (rhetorical question)

Your upcoming music and book events sound wonderful. Enjoy! I loved Let the Great World Spin. Coincidentally, that is our book group's read for May. I'm not certain if I will reread it or not. I think I remember it pretty well as it was a memorable book. ;-)

Postman is a great book. Cain also wrote Mildred Pierce, which I love.

>68 katiekrug: Hi Katie. Welcome and thanks for stopping by. I agree that Upstate NY is a great area. And so convenient to NYC, Boston, Vermont, the Adirondacks, Canada etc. And yet I see you landed in Dallas! We have relatives that live outside of Dallas and we have visited several times, although I didn't really get to see that much of the city itself. Just freeways, the airport and the Aquarium, which I really enjoyed. It's certainly very different from here. I could never live there, if for no other reason than that I would be constantly petrified driving - too fast and too congested!

>69 Donna828: Donna, I think I would welcome an excuse to re-read Let the Great World Spin, but really should get to some of his other books first.

>69 Donna828:-70 I don't think I have read anything by Cain and I'm trying to remember if I've even seen the movie.

Linda- If you like early noir fiction, you have to read Cain's 3 big ones. All are short and excellent. The original film versions are all great too!

Linda hope you have a great weekend and gradually imbibe Troubles as will I.

I will get over to the group page but am a tade worried that Suz's rate of progress may leave me floundering somewhat. Having irish ancestry the history is familiar of course but the realisation that there were actually quite a large group of "loyalists" is something I didn't realise quite so much.

>72 msf59: I haven't read much noir, Mark, but I think I recently picked up a cheap Kindle edition of best noir short stories (a bad sign that I don't remember for certain without checking - compulsive book buying?). Maybe I'll dip into that a bit to start.

>73 PaulCranswick: Hi Paul. I am forging ahead with Troubles. Don't worry about floundering, as I'll be right there with you! My father's ancestry was 100% Irish, but I don't know as much about the country's history as I feel I should. This will be a good opportunity to explore that. I will be interested in your perspective, since you were raised in England and were probably exposed to more than we were here.

Ireland has long been at the top of my list of countries to visit and I would love to go with some knowledge of my Irish ancestry prior to my grandparents' arrival in the States. A good time to start working on that. Unfortunately, my dad is long deceased and there aren't any close relatives from that generation to talk to, so it may not be easy.

I used to visit Ireland most years in my late teens and have had a promise extracted from me to SWMBO that we will go back there this Summer.

I attended two author talks last Thursday. The following are a few highlights that stood out for me.

Masha Gessen – NYS Writers Institute – University at Albany

Masha Gessen is a journalist who was born in Russia, emigrated to the US as a teenager, and returned as an adult to live in Russia, where she is actively involved in the protest movement. Her most recent book is The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin. The session I attended was entirely Q&A. Gessen was on Charlie Rose the day before this talk and many of the points she made were discussed more fully in this interview: www.charlierose.com/view/interview/12210

Gessen’s most interesting comments were related to her belief that Putin will not serve his full 6-year term, but rather will be deposed (perhaps sooner than later) and have to negotiate in order to avoid prosecution. She believes that the government is beginning to disintegrate on the ”bottom rung”, which will eventually lead to the current regime’s sudden collapse. She describes the current protest movement as being broad-based and vigorous, and focused on demanding the creation of public institutions, destroyed under Putin’s regime and necessary for public debate to occur.

In response to a question, Gessen spoke extensively about the October 2002 siege of a Moscow theatre, filled with around 800 people, and taken hostage by a group of armed Chechen terrorists, some of who reportedly had explosives strapped to their bodies. Government forces used underground passages to fill the theatre with gas, then stormed the theatre and shot the terrorists. In the process, 129 hostages died from the effects of the gas. Many questions remain regarding this incident, how the terrorists got past multiple checkpoints to enter Moscow, and the government’s decision to gas the theatre and shoot even the unconscious terrorists.

Gessen indicated that she has learned to be skeptical of "objectivity in journalism", speaking on the difficulties of meeting journalistic standards of objectivity in a country where the government is a closed system and access to public records is prohibited. Social media also functions differently than in the West, as users communicate mainly within unconnected circles of their own friends, rather than the overlapping, interconnections we experience. Protest movement sites are quickly taken down by the government. However, Facebook has just recently become available and may result in some changes, as it is impermeable to this type of action.

Gessen's response to questions about the LGB community's involvement in the protest movement was eye-opening. She indicated that many Russian cities have passed laws banning "LGB propaganda", the definition of which encompasses almost anything, with sanctions strengthened for "propaganda" aimed at children. As simply a lesbian with a child, she indicated that she could herself be subject to severe punishment under these laws.

Based on this talk, I am now anxious to read The Man Without a Face and other books by Gessen, including Perfect Rigor: A Genius and the Mathematical Breakthrough of the Century and Ester and Ruzya: How My Grandmothers Survived Hitler's War and Stalin's Peace .

The second talk from last week: Colum McCann – Siena College

Most of the evening involved McCann reading from both a work in progress and Let the Great World Spin, with some commentary and Q&A. In my opinion, he is a very interesting author and these brief comments will not at all do him justice.

The novel that McCann is currently writing is entitled Transatlantic. It will tie together visits made to Ireland by the abolitionist Frederick Douglass whose 1845 visit coincided with the beginnings of the potato famine, Senator George Mitchell who brokered the 1998 Northern Ireland peace process, and the little known Alcock and Brown who actually made the first transatlantic flight in 1919, starting from Newfoundland and ditching about 16 hours later in an Irish bog.

In discussing his inspiration to write Let the Great World Spin, McCann shared a personal experience of his father- in-law having been in the first tower hit, but able to get out and walk to McCann’s apartment. Although he initially intended to write only about Philippe Petit’s high wire walk between the Twin Towers as an allegory of 9/11, he wanted also to talk about fate, war and theology. His development of the characters Corrigan, based on Daniel Berrigan, and Claire drove the story forward from there. McCann also spoke of the challenges of converting books to film, revealing that he is currently working on a film script of Let the Great World Spin. He spoke of it sometimes being necessary to make changes to a story for a screenplay (I won’t reveal his “spoiler” on this), and that what is important is to “stay true to the texture of the message, rather than being slavish to the facts of the material”. I loved this book and cannot wait to see the movie.

It was interesting to learn that McCann has met with both Senator George Mitchell and Philippe Petit. Writing fiction about living individuals must be a very difficult and delicate challenge. I wish he had spoken more on this.

I loved Let the Great World Spin too Linda and will anxiously await the release of the movie. And I would have loved to hear Masha Gessen. After reading Suzanne's review of The Man Without a Face I am going to be looking for her book.

Linda- thanks for sharing your author experiences with us. Both sound terrific. I was a big fan of Let the Great World Spin too. Making a film of it will be very tricky. I wish them luck. I would like to read more of his earlier work. And "Transatlantic" sounds very interesting.

Hi Bonnie and Mark. If done well, I think Let the Great World Spin could be a fabulous movie, although for me it could never top the book. McCann was asked about this and responded something to the effect that "a book is a book and a film is a film". Meaning I suppose that we need to judge them by different standards. But McCann strikes me as an author with "creative integrity" who will want his work to be well-represented in film. And it is probably good that he is himself writing the film script.

I have finished Troubles but will hold off on posting a review until the end of the month, as I am participating in a group read of the book and am trying to avoid any spoilers.

I have started The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival by John Vaillant and from the very first page, was drawn in by Vaillant's writing. Funny how we just connect immediately with some authors. I'm glad that I own and have yet to read his other book, The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed.

In honor of St. Patrick's Day, I indulged my desire to learn more of the history of my Irish heritage and downloaded three books to my Kindle: The Irish Americans: A History by Jay P. Dolan, The Story of Ireland: A History of the Irish People by Neil Hegarty and A Popular History of Ireland: from the Earliest Period to the Emancipation of the Catholics - Complete by Thomas D'Arcy McGee. Luckily one was free, one was $.99 and only one was a new, overpriced e-book edition that I rarely indulge in.

Linda- I just wanted to let you know I finished The Orphan Master's Son and finally read your outstanding review. Great job on an excellent book.

Enjoy the Tiger. It's a fantastic book.

Thanks Mark. I knew that you would love The Orphan Master's Son. Adam Johnson is also a very interesting guy. I hope he writes another one soon!

Linda well done with Troubles, hopefully I will get it done by tomorrow. Have a lovely weekend.

See you at the group read, Paul. It may be over quickly if you are also almost done, and we know how long it will take Suz, as she simply inhales books. I think that leaves Ilana as the only other reader who has identified themselves.

We had a wonderful day yesterday. Perfect spring weather and a great concert by a young, very talented Armenian pianist, Nareh Arghamanyan, playing Clementi, Schubert, Rachmaninoff and Balakirev. I understand that she will be at Marlboro Music in Vermont this summer, should you be in the area and interested in such things. She also has a new recording of solo Rachmaninoff due out next month.

This week should also be a good one for author talks: Margot Livesey (The Flight of Gemma Hardy) and John Matteson, Pulitzer Prize winning biographer: Eden's Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father and most recently, The Lives of Margaret Fuller: A Biography.

I attended two author talks this week, both informal, Q&A style seminars.

Margot Livesey , author of The Flight of Gemma Hardy participated on a panel with another local author, known mostly as a columnist. Unfortunately, I felt that this format somewhat inhibited the depth of her response to questions.

Livesey is a very engaging person, funny and with an infectious smile and laugh, quite in contrast to her childhood in Scotland, which she described as having a Dickensian quality. Both of her parents worked for a Scottish school, her father as a teacher and mother as a nurse. Her father was 50 when she was born. Her mother died when Livesey was 2 ½ and her father married the school nurse hired to replace her. So at age 5, she was being raised by two 55-year olds. Her father smoked, never walked when he could drive, and had two sayings: “A good child is seen and not heard” and “Tis sharper than a serpent’s tooth to have a thankless child”. Her stepmother adopted a military approach to parenting. She was also sent briefly as a day student to a private school where she was very unhappy. She acknowledged some “recasting of her autobiography” in her writing: “What was misery at 5 became material at 55”.

In response to a question of how she balanced her own narrative voice with the influence of Jane Eyre in The Flight of Gemma Hardy, Livesey said that she thought the larger question was how to be more positively influenced by other writers, without mimicking them. She noted that many classic poems and novels “write back” to other works. She encourages writing students to learn by first imitating other writers and then moving beyond that.

Livesey was asked about the recurring supernatural motif in her works. She indicated that in Gemma Hardy, the porous membrane between this world and the next reflects the longing that many have to believe in something supernatural. She added that her own mother regularly saw dead people. Her discussion of the setting of the novel seemed to incorporate similar themes. She described Orkeny, situated off the north coast of Scotland, as a mysterious, evocative place having a megalithic history, including a stone-age village, stone circles and the oldest continually roofed cathedral in Europe. Her choice of Iceland as a second setting was influenced by its shared history with Scotland as part of the Viking Empire, and its great tradition of family and awareness of lineage. She also took delight in describing her experience of driving in Iceland’s lava fields, where even roads built recently suddenly detour around certain rocks, left intact because they are still believed by many to be the homes of elves.

Livesey spoke of the importance of having “hard-hearted” readers to give you feedback. When she was just starting out, the Irish Canadian writer Brian Moore, reviewed multiple drafts of a short story she was writing, giving her invaluable feedback. Even today, she exchanges all of her work with Andrea Barrett, who provides her with “ruthless” feedback, but “in a polite way”.

This week's second seminar:

John Matteson won the Pultizer Prize for his biography, Eden’s Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father. He has most recently published The Lives of Margaret Fuller, a biography of a little known and according to Matteson, under-appreciated 19th century feminist. Matteson is a Harvard-educated attorney whose doctoral studies were in English. He responded to questions with in-depth explanations and his injections of humor had the audience frequently laughing. I left most interested in reading Eden’s Outcasts.

Matteson indicated that he strongly disagrees with the notion of objectivity as a key feature of biography. He believes that if you look below the surface, you will find that “all biography is in one way or another autobiography.” His choices of Louisa May Alcott and Margaret Fuller as subjects support this, reflecting his interest in writing about families, parenthood and fathers. In Fall 2001, Matteson published an article that caught the attention of a literary agent, who contacted him and encouraged him to write a biography. Matteson had an interest in 19th century utopian communities, which led him to studying Bronson Alcott, whom he initially intended to be the subject of the biography. However, as a graduate student with a working wife, he had been the primary caretaker for their infant daughter. His parenting role and strong relationship with his daughter was what ultimately inspired him to focus on Louisa May and her relationship with her father. His family background as the child of Christian Scientist parents, who believed in faith healing as a type of “transcendental power”, may have fueled his interest in Margaret Fuller, who was closely associated with the American transcendentalism movement.

In response to the question of “for whom did he write his books”, Matteson responded that he probably wrote Eden’s Outcasts as a means of reconciling with his own father, who was highly accomplished, a compulsive perfectionist, likely had mild Asperger’s, and later developed dementia. He found it helpful and therapeutic to achieve an understanding of someone else’s father, if not his own. The Lives of Margaret Fuller was probably written for Margaret Fuller herself, whom he believed to be a truly well-rounded, self-educated individual who was light years ahead of her contemporaries. Fuller also had a strong relationship with her father, who was largely responsible for her early educational achievements, such as her ability to translate Latin fluidly by age 9.

Matteson spoke at length about Margaret Fuller, her upbringing, aspirations, and relationships with such figures such as Emerson, Thoreau, Bronson Alcott and Horace Greeley. One anecdote that I found interesting was that despite her strong advocacy for women to have education and employment opportunities, she was a latecomer to supporting abolishment of slavery, having earlier described abolitionists as tedious and rabid. She spent a number of years in Italy, involved in the revolutions of 1847-48, and there met her husband with whom she had one child. She died tragically at age 40, along with her husband and child. When trying to return to the US, their ship ran aground on Fire Island, was hit by a freak July hurricane, and her body was never recovered.

Well you've certainly been busy Linda. I am very interested in getting to know more about Margot Livesey through her books, two of which I own. I loved "What was misery at 5 became material at 55.". I really believe everybody has at least one story in them. I'm counting on that theory to help me to write a novel haha.

"ruthless feedback in a polite way is priceless and I wonder how she developed a relationship with Andrea Barrett, whose work I love.

John Matteson on the other hand is completely unknown to me but sounds very interesting. Ditto for Margaret Fuller. Maybe she was so busy advocating for women that she had no room on her plate for another cause like slavery? It might be that simple an explanation.

Hi Bonnie. I can't wait to read your novel! I'll bet you have more than one story in you.

I am also looking forward to reading some Livesey. She was certainly fun to listen to. I enjoyed the way that both she and Matteson freely shared things from their own family lives that were very personal, but relevant to their writing.

Margaret Fuller was apparently seen by many as not having the most pleasing of personalities, but I not sure how much of that was because she was stepping way outside of accepted female roles and behavior. On the slavery issue, Matteson conjectured that she may have been put off by the abolitionists more socially than intellectually.

I think I would enjoy Eden's Outcasts. I enjoy most of the Concord, Massachusetts writers!

What a wonderfully full few days Linda! Love a concert performance by an accomplished soloist and SWMBO and myself used to often attend the Malaysian Philharmonic (we got free tickets as quite a few of the orchestra live in our condo).
The author talks also sound very interesting experiences even if both of the writers are new to me. Enjoy winding down and don't think I've forgotten about Troubles but agahst I haven't finished it yet!

87, 88: Thank you for sharing about your author talks this week, Linda. I haven't read anything by either of them but their views on reading and writing were quite interesting nonetheless. You and Bonnie are adding immensely to my behind-the-scenes book knowledge. Who's coming to your corner of NY next month?

>91 thornton37814: Hi Lori. Nice to see you. Eden's Outcasts does certainly sound interesting.

>92 PaulCranswick: Good morning, Paul. Free tickets to the Philharmonic and you probably get to listen to the musicians practicing at home too - excellent.

You shouldn't worry about needing to finish Troubles before stopping by the group read. The way Suz structured it, we are discussing only Part I until the end of the month, when we would open it up to the full book. There has been some discussion on the thread, but no spoilers on the ending, although I am getting itchy to discuss that.

>93 Donna828: Thanks Donna. I am sad that the NYS Writers Institute will be winding down late April. The summer version runs during July at a different college, with great authors also. However, they are all in the evening and a bit further drive, and more geared to straight readings, which are of less interest to me than talks. So I usually attend fewer of those. I'm not crazy about being read to and have found that some wonderful authors are actually horrible readers of their own work. That's the reason I usually attend the afternoon seminars (Q&A format) when available, rather than the evening readings.

Anyway, there are still some very interesting ones coming up:

Robert Nickas - art critic and curator (Unfortunately, I may not make this one.)

Lauren Groff -Arcadia, The Monsters of Templeton

Joseph Lelyveld- Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India

Ghassan Zagtan - Palestinian poet: Like A Straw Bird It Follows Me (no touchstone) and Fady Joudah - poet and translator The Earth in the Attic

Anne Enright- The Forgotten Waltz

Shalom Auslander - Hope: A Tragedy

Martha Rozett - UA Shakespearean scholar and author: When People Wrote Letters: A Family Chronicle (no touchstone, a family memoir)

Anne Enright and Shalom Auslander would be interesting I'm sure. Still struggling along with Troubles - enjoying it but can't seem to make it disappear!

Morning Linda- Wow, it looks like these author events are keeping you hopping. Very cool. I have an ER copy of Hope: A Tragedy, I've been trying to squeeze in.

The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival by John Vaillant

On a bitter cold day in December 1997, deep in the taiga of the Russian Far East, an encounter between a tiger and a man ends in tragedy. Other than his clothing and the bones of his extremities, little remains of Vladimir Markov to be gathered for his funeral. Yuri Trush, squad leader for the territorial government’s Inspection Tiger unit, and his teammates are left to decipher the scattered evidence, to reconstruct and understand the events.

“Save for the movements of the dog and the men, the forest has gone absolutely still; even the crows have withdrawn, waiting for this latest disturbance to pass. And so, it seems, has the tiger. Then, there is a sound: a brief, rushing exhale - the kind one would use to extinguish a candle. But there is something different about the volume of air being moved and the force behind it - something bigger and deeper: this is not a human sound.

…A conversation of sorts has been unfolding in this lonesome hollow. It is not in a language like Russian or Chinese, but it is a language nonetheless, and it is older than the forest. The crows speak it, and so do the men - some more fluently than others. That single blast of breath contained a message lethal in its eloquence.”

The Primorye Territory, located in the Russian Far East, is a thickly forested, mountainous region bordered by China and the Sea of Japan. Unique in the breadth of its biodiversity and characterized by Vaillant as “boreal jungle”, it is home to many large mammals, including bears, wild boars, musk deer, moose, leopards and a dwindling population of Amur tiger. The region’s human inhabitants are extremely impoverished, living in isolated villages and supported by logging, beekeeping, hunting, gathering and trapping. Highly dependent upon the natural resources of the region for their daily survival, many of necessity turn to poaching,

Native human populations in the Russian Far East have long lived in proximity to the Amur tiger, with encounters traditionally marked by respectful withdrawal of both man and big cat. Tiger attacks on humans are rare occurrences here, yet the evidence is clear that this tiger has deliberately singled out Markov. In recounting the Inspection Tiger unit’s investigation, Vaillant constructs a fascinating, enlightening portrait of an incredibly powerful and intelligent creature - an ambush hunter that lives in tentative accord with humans, yet when injured or provoked, is capable of purposeful and deadly revenge.

“What is amazing - and also terrifying about tigers - is their facility for what can only be described as abstract thinking. Very quickly, a tiger can assimilate new information - evidence, if you will - ascribe it to a source, and even a motive, and react accordingly.”

The tiger is an ancient animal, dating back to the Pleistocene Epoch (1.8 million to 10,000 years BCE), the Amur tiger being the largest subspecies and the only one adapted to arctic conditions. As the population of the Primorye region has increased, the numbers of tiger have dropped precipitously due to poaching, tigers being highly valued in the Chinese marketplace. Vaillant reports estimates of fewer than four hundred tigers remaining in the Russian Far East, with similar declines seen throughout Asia. The potential consequences are unthinkable, as the tiger seems poised to become the largest carnivore to go extinct in the wild since the American lion, ten thousand years ago at the end of the Pleistocene era.

“The difference between the extinctions at the close of the Pleistocene and the bulk of those taking place today is one of consciousness: this time, however passively they may occur, they still amount to voluntary acts. Simply put: we know better. This is not an opinion, or a moral judgment; it is a fact.”

I loved this book and found it riveting from the first lines of the prologue to the last words of the epilogue, and further enriched by an extensive bibliography. Vaillant takes the reader into an unfamiliar world, a harsh environment where men and animals coexist and daily survival trumps “living” as the foremost concern. His elucidation of the historic, economic and ecological forces that have converged to create this world is seamlessly interwoven with descriptions of tiger behavior. Not satisfied with simply writing an informative and suspenseful narrative, Vaillant has taken us on a journey to the Russian taiga and has given us a glimpse into the soul of the region and its inhabitants, both human and big cat.

I highly recommend this as both an entertaining and important book for anyone concerned with the future of our ecosystems.
5 stars

>95 PaulCranswick:, 96 Hi Paul and Mark! I am especially excited about seeing Anne Enright and also very curious about Ghassan Zagtan and Fady Joudah.

I think I'll wait for your review of Hope: A Tragedy, Mark. That and seeing Auslander in person will help me decide on that one.

You must not want to leave the Majestic, Paul. But I hope you finish before the rest of us go home!

Linda- What an excellent review of "The Tiger"! You earned a Big Thumb! And I hope you inspire a few more readers to pick up this terrific book. I'm looking forward to seeing what Vaillant does in the future.

Thank you Mark. I remember that you loved this book also. Have you read his other book, The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed? I have it somewhere in my TBR piles and need to find it now.

Excellent review of The Tiger, Linda; I'll add it to my wish list.

First Mark, then Claudia and now you Linda, The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival ...I really need to get to this book. Excellent review, BTW.

Unfortunately, the only Anne Enright book I've read was The Gathering, which I thought was dreadful. I don't know if that was typical of her writing. I probably should try something else.

I guess I should check and see what authors will be here during the summer. I know Chautauqua will probably be featuring some. Lauren Groff would be interesting.

Linda- No I haven't read The Golden Spruce. I think you recently mentioned it and I had never heard of it. Of course on the mighty WL it goes.

>101 kidzdoc: Thanks Darryl. I think you would enjoy it.

>102 brenzi: Thanks Bonnie. I hope you do give The Tiger a try. I actually liked The Gathering, although I know many did not.

Chautauqua looks like it has wonderful programs. Now I am really jealous. You will need to go and share!

I just read a discouraging LT ER review of Groff's new book, Arcadia. I think I will instead read The Monsters of Templeton, which I own. Much of my interest in her is that she grew up in Cooperstown, a great day trip from here. And I believe Templeton is supposed to be based on the village.

>103 msf59: Gotta love those groaning wishlists, Mark.

Troubles by J. G. Farrell

The 1919 Ireland of J.G. Farrell’s Troubles is a country that seems poised to unravel, with tensions growing between the Protestant Anglo-Irish aristocracy and the Catholic Irish Nationalists. Against this background, WWI veteran Major Archer, arrives at the Majestic, a faded, crumbling hotel with a glorious history, occupied by the owner, Edward Spencer, and his family, and an array of quirky staff and elderly tenants. The immediate purpose of the Major’s visit is to rectify a misunderstanding with the owner’s daughter who mistakenly believes herself to be his fiancé. His purpose in staying on becomes a jumble of romantic attraction, obligation and a seeming lack of anything better to do. After months sleepily witnessing the decline of his romantic hopes, the Majestic and Edward Spencer, Archer’s sudden departure is forced by jarringly unanticipated violence committed against both edifice and individuals.

Farrell is a masterful creator of character and setting, who infuses even the most painful moments of the story with an understated humor. The Majestic and its residents come fully alive, despite being exaggerated caricatures of an entitled class, whose privileged lifestyle of elegance and leisure is vanishing, transformed by the times into a preposterous, crumbling existence. And there is prophetic irony in Archer’s near-doom and Farrell’s own final fate, at too young an age.

“People are insubstantial. They never last. All this fuss, it’s all fuss about nothing. We’re here for a while and then we’re gone. People are insubstantial. They never last at all.”

Farrell approaches the book’s title subject, the Troubles, with extreme subtly. Snippets of newspaper articles, written in a simple, folksy tone, are scattered throughout the narrative, introducing the political events that form the backdrop to the story. The articles serve to place the story's events in time, location and tradition, while revealing some of the early history of Sinn Fein, the similarities between Ireland and India in contributing to the dismantling of the British Empire, and the parallels between Sinn Fein and the Bolsheviks as revolutionary movements.

As farcical as the residents of the Majestic are, I could not help but feel that this novel presents a somewhat one-sided view of the conflict. The Irish in general are described as an unruly, troublesome lot, whose women are all plump. Although members of the occupying British Army are obnoxious, destructive drunkards, it is the anonymous “Shinners” who commit the most sadistic and inhumane acts, without regard to the victims’ guilt or innocence. Yet the poverty and hunger of the populace, left to starve at the whims of the privileged, are alluded to only lightly.

In the end, I was left wondering about Farrell's own political leanings and puzzled as to whether or not he was taking a political position of sorts in this novel, understanding that he was of both English and Irish ancestry. But I believe that the best literature leaves us with more questions than when we started, sending us off to pursue new areas of inquiry. As a window into my scant knowledge of Irish history and my own little-known Irish ancestry, Farrell’s Troubles succeeds brilliantly at that.

5 stars

Terrific review of Troubles, Linda. I went to a lot of, err...trouble to locate the esteemed Farrell trilogy a few years ago, and now they sit languishing on the shelf with their other neglected companions. I think I'll read them in chronological order beginning with The Siege of Krishnapur. Have you read that one?

The list of upcoming author visits is impressive. You may need to take the summer off to come back down to earth! I'll be watching for your reports.

Thanks Donna. I haven't yet read either of the two other books of Farrell's trilogy but definitely plan to. He is a fabulous writer. I wish I had read them in chronological order also. Many say that Troubles is his best.

This past week has been an interesting mix of literary events. An author talk by Lauren Groff (notes below), two lectures on the archaeology and meaning of The Dead Sea Scrolls, and a finally, a wonderful lecture/dramatic reading of the speaker's own retellings of seven tales from Ovid's Metamorphoses. This is what retirement was meant to be!

This past week I attended a Writers Institute author talk by Lauren Groff, author of two novels, Arcadia and Monsters of Templeton and a short story collection, Delicate Edible Birds. I may read Monsters of Templeton as I own it, but probably not the others, as my interest in her is primarily as an upstate NY author, raised in Cooperstown, NY, although currently living in Florida. Groff described spending whole days as a child in a willow tree (by the lake?) reading, and she tries to get back here by revisiting upstate in her writing. Having been to Cooperstown, I have a vision in my mind of that wonderful moment.

Groff’s writing methods are interesting and seem somewhat incongruous with her relatively young age. She writes in longhand on legal pads for at least 2-3 drafts before transferring the work to the computer. The purpose of her first draft is for her characters to come alive and “tell her who they are”. When she is finished, she puts the first draft in a box and starts all over again. She is very secretive in her writing, isn’t a big fan of “workshopping”, and does not share a book or its subject with anyone until near completion, as she finds it “kills” the work if she talks about it prematurely. Eventually she gives it to her husband, then friends, and finally her editor.

She described borrowing an idea from Alice Munro that “stories are houses she can walk into and know what is under the bed, in the drawers”. By knowing enough about it, she can then write the story. In order to move from two to three-dimensional stories, Groff draws maps of the physical setting and relationships among characters, “building a structure that she can walk around in.” She tends to “over-write” and when having a problem, will sit down and write 10-20 pages on a specific character until she knows them thoroughly.

In terms of why she chose to write Arcadia, she described having recently moved to Gainesville, Florida, being pregnant with her first child, lonely and sad and as a writer, spending her time “alone in the dark”. She decided she wanted to research happiness and those who try hard to be happy, which led her to utopian communities. She mentioned the lack of quotation marks and use of the present tense in the book, saying that she "wanted to pull the reader in close". But I wasn't sure if she was referring both to the quotation mark issue and the present tense, as she followed it with something to the effect that because she was skipping between time periods, she wanted the distance between the reader and the story to stay the same throughout.

Groff said that for her, writing is overall a joyful experience, with “happy moments of pure epiphany.” She feels that reading poetry is particularly important to a fiction writer, although she noted her favorite authors are short story writers. Her advice to aspiring writers? Don’t get an MFA if you have to pay for it. Take risks, don’t be safe, and accept pain and fear as part of the process for all writers. And approach editing as requiring a balance of humility and arrogance. She specifically mentioned Stephen King’s On Writing, which Mark (MSF59) and others on LT have praised, as containing excellent advice on revision and editing.

Next up this coming week: Joseph Lelyveld, author of Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India.

Well somehow I seem to have lost you for a bit Linda. Anyway found you now and love your review of Troubles which was a 5 star read for me a couple of years ago. And of course I immediately went out and got The Siege of Krishnapur which has quietly sitting with a collection of NYRB books that I have, waiting to be chosen. I'm hoping that will happen soon. Not sure if I'll ever read the third book in the trilogy because of bad reviews.

Lauren Groff certainly is an interesting writer. I didn't think anyone still wrote in long hand. I'll be interested in your review when you get to her book.

Linda- I only skimmed your review of Troubles, because I hope to get to it, in the next few weeks. So many people have raved about this one.
Thanks for sharing your Lauren Groff experience. I was not familiar with her until I read some glowing reviews of Arcadia, which has quickly gone very high on my WL.

>110 brenzi: Glad you found me again, Bonnie! I plan to read Farrell's full trilogy, although I wish I had read them in order to begin with, as Troubles seems to be generally acknowledged as his best. Although I haven't read the reviews, LTers average ratings of The Singapore Grip do seem high.

>111 msf59: Good to see you Mark. I think you will really, really love Troubles. And I'll be curious to see what you think of Arcadia.

Joseph Lelyveld, NYS Writers Institute

This week’s Writers Institute seminar was with Joseph Lelyveld, whose background is as a journalist, having been a foreign correspondent, managing editor, and executive editor for the New York Times. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1985 for Move Your Shadow: South Africa Black and White and has published a memoir, Omaha Blues. His most recent book is Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India.

Lelyveld was a Times correspondent in both South Africa and India. It was while in South Africa that he first became interested in Gandhi, who lived there for 21 years and developed his value system before returning to India at age 44. While in South Africa, Gandhi founded the Phoenix Settlement in the area of Durban, where there was a concentration of Indians, who represented the smallest ethnic minority in South Africa with a population totaling approximately 100,000. Lelyveld felt that there was considerable “un-mined” material from Gandhi’s South African period that provided a different point of view than other existing biographies.

While most biographers have approached Gandhi from the perspective of his struggles on behalf of India, Lelyveld’s viewpoint has been Gandhi’s struggles with India. He portrays Gandhi as having been very discouraged and plagued with feelings of failure – that he had not been sufficiently pure and focused in his moral strivings, and as a result India had not fully embraced his teachings on non-violence and addressing the needs of the poor. So deep was his disappointment that he did not attend India’s celebration of Independence, refused all interviews and spent the day fasting. Lelyveld wrote primarily for an Indian audience, expected it to be somewhat controversial, but was surprised that what caused an outraged reaction was a relatively minor aspect of the book, where he discussed Gandhi’s relationship with a male architect with whom he lived at one point in South Africa, apart from his wife.

Lelyveld expressed concern about how India has used the time since it gained independence. This discussion reminded me of LT conversations regarding recent books on India that focus on the different economic classes, including Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers. At Gandhi’s time, there were around 350 million people living in India, 60-70% of whom were very poor. Today, one-third of the world’s poorest people live in India. While the total population has grown and the size of the middle class increased significantly, the number of very poor has remained the same. Now representing only 25-30% of the total population, the very poor have become a “special interest” which is off to the side except at election time. In describing the excesses of today’s India, he mentioned one Indian family where two brothers are billionaires, one of whom has built a new 26-story residence, with 3 helipads, some outrageous number of cars that I didn’t catch, and 100 servants, all to support a family of 6. He was quick, however, to note that this and other countries have plenty of their own examples of excess.

Lelyveld spoke of his views on where journalism and publishing are going in the next 5-10 years, feeling that there would always be good, serious writing and journalism in both hard copy and e-book form. However, questions of intellectual property will plague the future of newspapers and magazines, as more entities become only disseminators, rather than gatherers of news. This issue is being compounded by the fact that major newspapers are all retrenching and of necessity shifting resources to web-related functions that have little to do with news-gathering (ex. the need to put videos up on the web).

As an aside, Lelyveld spoke of legislation that has been proposed by South Africa’s ANC government, although not yet enacted, that would broadly define national security in such a manner that the government could charge authors, newspapers etc. with a violation simply for writing something negative about the ANC. Lelyveld commented that this and the way the ANC is governing are somewhat discouraging and unfortunately reminiscent of administrations under apartheid. Although I am not sufficiently informed to have an opinion on this statement, I was thinking about his comment in a seminar yesterday where the speaker was addressing the development of one’s personal “worldview”. He cited Glenn Tinder’s Political Thinking: The Perennial Questions, which addresses issues of political theory from the perspective of beliefs regarding the “extent and origins of evil in human beings” and the existence of an after-life. This is a book I have not read but will look for, as it sounds thought-provoking, posing crucial questions regarding ethics and the nature of governments.

The Tinder book sounds worth reading. Thanks for mentioning it.

Hi Judy. The Tinder book doesn't seem easy to find new at a reasonable price. Our library system doesn't have it and even the Amazon paperback is listed at a ridiculous $48. I'm guessing that it may be mostly sold in academic settings. But the University Library does have it, fortunately. I hope you're able to find a copy.

Linda - Your Troubles review put my careless effort to shame. Not sure that he is taking a political position rather than sending the whole lot up. Everybody comes out of the tale badly but not dreadfully so. Everyone seems to do everything poorly including the nasty bits.

Also enjoying your trips and reports upon the Writer's Institute meetings. Wonderful illuminating stuff.

Thanks Paul. Glad to see you back and out and about on the threads.

>115 Linda92007: Ouch! Well, I'll check the library here. But it may be more aimed at academics. I wonder if it's available on Kindle?

eta: nope, not on Kindle. Oh well. I'm not exactly on a desert island with no books at the moment.

Last week's NYS Writer's Institute event with two Palestinian poets, Ghassan Zaqtan and Fady Joudah, was cancelled, hopefully to be rescheduled in the fall. Zaqtan experienced delays in securing a visa and Joudah, who is Palestinian-American and already in the country, experienced travel delays. So I assuaged my extreme disappointment by purchasing Zaqtan's newly released Like A Straw Bird It Follows Me: And Other Poems and an unmentionable number of other poetry books. (Someone please protect me from the TBR Therapy group!)

I have been quiet over here, as I am trying to finish the multiple tomes that I am immersed in, while also having one of those very busy months. But I hope to be back soon with my short story challenge update and notes from a talk by Anne Enright this upcoming week.

Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me sounds interesting. I have several poetry collections by Adonis and Mahmoud Darwish, but I haven't heard of Zaqtan or Joudah before. I look forward to your comments about this book.

Hi Darryl. This is the first of Zaqtan's works that has been translated into English.

Joudah may also be of interest to you, particularly since he is not only a translator and a poet, but also a physician. He not only translated Zaqtan's collection, but also Darwish's The Butterfly's Burden. And he won the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition for The Earth in the Attic, which is actually available in a Kindle edition. Since I haven't seen it in bookstores here, I am going to purchase it, despite its being on the pricey side for an ebook.

Linda, I am thoroughly enjoying your author reports. I especially liked heading about Lauren Groff's writing process. I wasn't crazy about Monsters, but I was impressed with her writing. She takes her art seriously.

I am going to see Ridley Pearson on April 26. I'm not too interested in his books, but I can't wait to hear about his experiences with Stephen King et al. in the "Rock Bottom Remainders."

Thanks Donna. I should get around to reading The Monsters of Templeton soon, particularly as I am planning a day-trip with friends to Cooperstown, the setting of the book. It's a great village with a beautiful lake, wonderful museums and a used bookstore that I really like!

I am not familiar with Ridley Pearson, although I do remember hearing about the Rock Bottom Remainders. I hope you'll post comments.

I attended two author events this past week.

Anne Enright – NYS Writers Institute - RPI (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute)

Ms. Enright gave an enjoyable reading from The Forgotten Waltz, but most of the questions asked were specific to the book and her responses were generally brief. The following is what I found most interesting and relevant to understanding her writing process.

Enright indicated that she obtains her ideas from her characters, which once she has "two people in one space...look for their own stories". She tends to not give much physical description of her narrators, as she wants the reader to inhabit them as real people who are living inside themselves and looking out. She is interested in the intimacy of coming to grips with a character and tries to get on paper particularly the things that women think but don’t say aloud. For example, she described The Gathering as “an indictment of the Irish culture of secrets”, dealing with “how the mind approaches the unsayable of sexual abuse”. She also described children as being “great carriers of the uncanny”, as with children and cats alike, we don’t know what they are thinking when they look at us.

Enright described the writing process as “like a tide coming in and going out”, a continual process of adding, revising and adding more, and a part of understanding what is being written. She prefers writing on a computer, as the “external” appearance of the words helps her to get the rhythm of the voice. She also spoke of the endings of her novels as being open and the beginning of the narrator’s real life, and expressed that she herself wonders what happens to them next.

I am among those who actually liked Enright’s Booker-prize winner The Gathering. But as I am not convinced I want to read the Orange-listed The Forgotten Waltz, I will wait for some of my favorite LT reviewers to report first.

Bob Woodward – Union College

Bob Woodward is a preeminent investigative journalist and author, who along with Carl Bernstein, is best known for his reporting for the Washington Post on Nixon’s Watergate scandal. He has since written many books on modern-day presidencies and the Supreme Court, the latest being Obama’s Wars, and currently has a work in progress on Obama’s economic policies. I simply cannot do justice to Bob Woodward’s talk. He was compelling, informative and intelligent, full of humorous anecdotes with great delivery, and generous with his time, speaking for about 45 minutes and responding to questions for another full hour. Anything I say will suffer in its presentation by comparison to his talk.

Woodward described the media as being often driven by impatience and speed. He had high praise for Katharine Graham, publisher of the Washington Post during the Watergate period, for providing them the resources and pushing them to dig ever deeper in verifying their facts, despite having crossed into uncharted territory by accusing a sitting president of criminal behavior. He used a wonderful phrase to describe her leadership style: “mind on, hands off”.

Related to the Supreme Court’s deliberations on “Obama Care”, Woodward cautioned against making assumptions of the outcome on the basis of the oral arguments. Woodward’s observations have been that oral arguments are pro forma and less important than the behind the scenes discussions. He cited as an example the case of Mohammed Ali’s conscientious objector case, where the Supreme Court fully reversed its initial opinion, as the justices one by one became concerned about appearances and public reaction if they were to issue a ruling that would send Ali to prison.

On the subject of the upcoming presidential campaign, Woodward stated that the contest between the actual candidates may be overshadowed and defined by a second “campaign” of Super PACS versus the news media. As a result of the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, he anticipates that advertising will be consistently negative, with some truth and much that is not true, and that if the media does not sort this out for the voting public, we will be in a “garbage dump” of misinformation.

Woodward described the challenge of reporting in an environment where news sources change their accounts daily, as necessary to serve their purposes. He told a humorous story about sitting behind Henry Kissinger at a conference where participants were given a health-related “self-test” to determine how many years they had left to live. Peeking over Kissinger’s shoulder, he saw that his first score indicated that he had died four years ago. Obviously very unhappy with this, Kissinger erased and re-scored his test, coming up with a result of having 8 years to live. Kissinger was a master “re-scorer”, but far from holding a monopoly on this.

Woodward indicated his feelings that of all the major problems that confront us, what we should worry about most is secrecy in government, feeling that this has been a major issue in all recent presidential administrations. He emphasized that there is an almost immeasurable concentration of power in the presidency. But he also believes that while they are all very different, all of the presidents after Nixon have in fact made a good faith effort to act in concert with the national interest.

He illustrated this with an account of Gerald Ford’s pardoning of Richard Nixon, suspected by many to have resulted from a deal that would gain Ford the presidency. Woodward interviewed Ford years later and asked him why he had issued the pardon and whether he had been offered such a deal. Ford responded that in fact there had been such an offer, but that he had refused it. He said rather that he had “pardoned Nixon for the country”, feeling that we were experiencing serious problems related to the economy and the Cold War, and could not afford to remain under the cloud of Watergate for several more years. Ford felt that in order to move on with the country’s business, he needed to establish his own presidency and Watergate needed to be brought to an end. Woodward came away from this interview with a new understanding that what had appeared to be dirty was actually the opposite, and very gutsy. Even Ted Kennedy, who had opposed Nixon’s pardon, twenty-five years later acknowledged that Ford had done the right thing and awarded him the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage award. The lesson from this, as described by Woodward, is to be cautious about having “too much certainty about things you can’t be certain of”.

Linda - fascinating accounts of two very different writers. Would have been drawn to Woodward more as I suspect you were - Enright's The Gathering was Ok for me but not a prize winner and it doesn't seem that she was too giving when it comes to sharing he thoughts on her work.

Woodward seems to have taken you through US political reportage of the last 40 years. I would have been absolutely riveted I'm sure. I remember reading All the President's Men more years ago than I care to remember and enjoying it even though it was a tad dry for a teenager.

Thanks as usual for letting us all experience the atmosphere of the thing just a little from such a distance.

Oh I would have loved to hear Woodward speak although I've never read any of his books. I may have seen the movie All the President's Men though. But I've seen him on the Sunday morning talk shows and he always seems thoughtful, well-versed and intelligent, which can't be said of many of those who appear LOL.

Enright would not interest me at all but you always manage to make me jealous of your author experiences Linda.

Hi Paul and Bonnie. Woodward was indeed riveting. He is a natural born story-teller and had the audience laughing and applauding throughout. If you ever have the chance to hear him speak, you really should go.

I was somewhat disappointed in Enright's talk, not that it was bad, but it just didn't leave me interested in reading any more of her work. But that's part of the beauty of the Writer's Institute. Since the events are free, the price of attendance is only a few hours of my time. And while some have been better than others, I have never been sorry that I went.

Linda, I've just found your friend. You read some very interesting books. The Broken Word looks well worth a read - I really enjoyed the Quickening Maze.

Nice to see you, Rhian. I found the The Broken Word to be outstanding - quite powerful - and I wonder why Foulds hasn't published more poetry.

By the way, I've been lurking a bit on your thread, enjoying those sweet pictures of puppies and children!

Hi Linda- Hey, how did the Auslander talk go? I'm all ears!

> 131 Hi Mark. It may be a few days before I get a chance to sit down to put my thoughts together. I am still somewhat puzzled by him. He is very funny, although sometimes in almost a sad way, and his gratuitous use of swear words wore thin for me after awhile. I can't decide what was the real Auslander and what was simply well-honed persona. More later!

Shalom Auslander – NYS Writers Institute

Every now and again I attend a talk by an author that I don’t expect to want to read. But the events are free and I always learn something from them. Shalom Auslander falls in that category for me.

Auslander referred often to having been raised in an ultra-Orthodox Jewish enclave in Rockland County, with depression, anger, rage and rebellion being the result of his dysfunctional upbringing. Attending very conservative schools that focused on learning Hebrew and Yiddish, he was taught that writing was sinful and foolish, as it was “the finger of God” that moved the pen. His path to becoming a writer started with accidentally discovering literature as a youth, which he smuggled into his house to read: Kafka, Beckett, Lenny Bruce and Leonard Michaels, whose I Would Have Saved Them if I Could was the first book he purchased. He lasted only three weeks in college, quitting when a literature professor made him realize that he would be expected to respond in a prescribed way to the works being studied. He started writing to deal with his burning anger, figuring that his choices for doing so were either standup comic or author. Interestingly, he says he now rarely reads, as he either “gets angry - because I didn’t write it first, or tears it apart - because I didn’t write it first”. (His deadpan delivery doesn’t translate well on the page. Believe me, it was funny.)

Hope: A Tragedy is the third of Auslander’s books and his first novel. It will also be opening as a play this Fall in London and has a movie in progress, with both involving differences from the book, as plays require more dialogue and films are more visual. He describes his memoir, Foreskin’s Lament, and collection of short stories, Beware of God: Stories, as being about “how to get rid of the God idea” and then “how to deal with now only having people left to blame”. He has also been on several episodes of NPR’s This American Life. Auslander noted that the processes of writing fiction and nonfiction are quite similar, with the difference being mainly where one gets their material.

Auslander describes Hope: A Tragedy as being not far from memoir, having been written to deal with messages given him as a child – you will die, everyone hates you, fate is harsh. His protagonist needed a fatal flaw, his own being a bad streak of optimism, so he started the story with a guy whose past weighs heavily on him and whose biggest problem is an inability to give up. He moves his family to the woods. Auslander moved his family to Woodstock, NY. His inclusion of Anne Frank in the story was an idea that emanated from having been every year, starting at age 6, shown film clips of the Holocaust and Anne Frank. Yet he feels the book is not about the Holocaust, but is rather about history, and contains more elements of Christianity than of Judaism. He described its humor as coming from futile hope and elements of the grotesque, with the main character’s struggle to hide Anne Frank and get her out of the house being funny from an outside point of view, but not from that of the character. He wrote 3 or 4 versions of the book that were awful and offensive even to him, before finding the right way to tell the story.

I am still somewhat puzzled by Auslander. He was very funny, although in a way that sometimes left me feeling sad for him, and his gratuitous use of swear words wore thin for me after awhile. I can't decide whether I was seeing the real Auslander or what has become a well-honed persona. His most revealing moment was when speaking of Kafka as going into the dark depths of a joke, with the first chapter being very funny, the second chapter no longer funny, and the third even worse. “There’s something funny on the surface that really isn’t – sort of like life.” I think that this perfectly sums up my reaction to Auslander’s talk.

Hi Linda- I loved your thoughts on the Auslander talk. You are very articulate and concise in your writing. I should take lessons. He seems like a dark and fascinating guy.
At first, you mentioning "Hope" might be made into a play, I groaned but the more I think about it, in the right hands, that could work very well. I have not laughed out loud at a book like that, in quite some time. Of course, I did my share of wincing and cringing too.

his gratuitous use of swear words wore thin for me after awhile.

More like fatuous use of swear words...surely unnecessary at a Writer's Institute event?

>134 msf59: Thanks Mark. Looking at the LT reviews, it seems to be his humor that draws readers in. A friend who also attended had read his other two books and thought they were very funny. But I don't generally connect with laugh-out-loud writing and I don't think his books are for me.

>135 PaulCranswick: Good word for it, Paul. It was part of what made me wonder how much of it was his "act". His talk did at times feels a bit like stand-up comedy. A defense mechanism perhaps?

Hi Linda.
>124 Linda92007:: I didn't care for The Gathering but liked Enright's writing. I like that tide analogy. I sort of said the same thing about the ending of Infinite Jest but more on the order of infinity.

Ridley Pearson was a hoot... he started off with this long story about a trip to Laos with a friend when they were 18 (visiting the friend's family) and their adventure with pushing a train up the mountain. After many attempts they finally succeeded... and "that is what writing a book is like" was his punch line! He did lots of sound effects that don't transfer well via computer. I wish we got more authors to visit here. I do so enjoy your reports, however, and I don't have to change clothes and drive somewhere to hear the best parts. ;-) Please keep on keeping us in the loop.

>137 Donna828: I'm glad you were able to hear Ridley Pearson speak, Donna. Sounds like a great story - what kind of a train can you push up a mountain? Even with authors that I don't particularly want to read, I enjoy the opportunity to find out some about who they are as individuals. And I like writing the reports. But this month I am way behind on my reviews!

To A Mountain In Tibet by Colin Thubron

Colin Thubron’s account of his trek, from the most remote regions of Nepal to the sacred places of Manasarovar Lake and Mount Kailas in Tibet, conveys the sense of a deeply personal and otherworldly experience. His descriptions of the terrain and its people are mesmerizing and seamlessly interwoven with details of the region’s history and spiritual beliefs. A strong sense of place and its mysticism, combined with glimpses of the author’s own memories and emotions, makes this a truly absorbing travel narrative.

For the one fifth of the world’s population who are Buddhist, Hindu and Bon, Mount Kailas, known in ancient Hindu scriptures as Mount Meru, represents the center of the world. It is also of great ecological significance, being the source of India’s four great rivers: the Indus, Ganges, Sutlej and Brahmaputra. Protected by its sanctity, topography and strict Chinese controls, Mount Kailas has never been climbed.

“We are gazing on a country of planetary strangeness. Beneath us, in a crescent of depthless silence, a huge lake curves empty out of sight. It is utterly still. In the plateau’s barren smoothness it makes a hard purity, like some elemental carving, and its colour is almost shocking: a violent peacock blue. There is no bird or wind-touched shrub to start a sound. And in the cleansed stillness high above, floating on foothills so faded that it seems isolated in the sky, shines the cone of Mount Kailas.

…There seem no colours left in the world but this bare earth-brown, the snow’s white, and the sheen of the mirrored sky. Everything else has been distilled away. The south face of Kailas is fluted with the illusion of a long, vertical stairway, as if for spirits to climb by. It shines fifty miles away in an unearthly solitude. Void of any life, the whole region might have survived from some sacred prehistory, shorn of human complication. We have entered holy land.”

Traveling mostly by foot in an area without roads, Thubron is accompanied only by a guide and a cook, and occasionally a horseman. Many of the local people are excruciatingly poor in a material sense, their access to education and even rudimentary health care extremely limited or nonexistent. Yet their lives are embedded in a richness of spiritual beliefs that date back to ancient times, populated by a vast array of spirits, demons and deities who seem to still exist amongst them. Monasteries are scattered throughout the landscape, the monks serving as caretakers for the Buddhas, goddesses and bodhisattvas who are enshrined as statues deep within monastic caves. Thubron devotes substantial portions of his narrative to these belief systems, including some fascinating descriptions of Tantric practices.

“Guided by his guru, the novice selects a tutelary Buddha or divinity – a yidam- and by an intense practice of identification achieves an imagined fusion with him…Over months and years of rapt visualisation, the adept starts to assimilate to the yidam, enthroned, perhaps in his mandala palace. As his mind awakens, he experiences the mandala as real. Sometimes the god himself may be conjured to inhabit it. In time the yogi can summon or dissolve the picture at will. And slowly, at will, he becomes the god. Mentally he takes on his appearance, his language (in oft-repeated mantras) and even his mind. He experiences his own body as a microcosm of the secret body of the universe. The world becomes a mandala. Seated upright, in union with Meru-Kailas, his breathing regulates and stills. At last, he feels his body thinning into illusion, he merges with the Buddha, and it is time to depart.”

Death is a recurring theme of Thubron’s journey. The Hindu God of Death, Yama, dwells on Mount Kailas. Both Indian and Tibetan pilgrims venture to the region to circumambulate the lake and mountain in a quest to erase their sins and gain merit towards reincarnation. Some practice their deaths there, while others actually die, being poorly acclimated to the altitude and ill-prepared for the exertion and extreme conditions. Sky burials are performed here – the bodies burned or fed to vultures - and a litter of bags, boots, socks, hats, human hair and fingernails left strewn over the terrain as offerings. The Buddhist belief in the transience of all things sharply contrasts with the author’s mourning of his own immediate family members, his mother recently deceased and his sister having died tragically as a young woman in a skiing accident on another mountain.

“And you? Why are you doing this, traveling alone?

I cannot answer.

I am doing this on account of the dead.

You cannot walk out your grief, I know, or absolve yourself of your survival, or bring anyone back. You are left with the desire only that things not be as they are. So you choose somewhere meaningful on the earth’s surface, as if planning a secular pilgrimage. Yet the meaning is not your own. Then you go on a journey (it’s my profession after all), walking to a place beyond your own history, to the sound of the river flowing the other way. In the end, you come to rest at a mountain that is holy to others…

To ask of a journey Why? is to hear only my own silence. It is the wrong question (although there seems no other). Am I harrowing myself because the world is mortal? Whose pain am I purging?…An old Tibetan monk tells me the soul has no memory. The dead do not feel their past.”

As he is approaching 73 years of age, Thubron’s years of active travel writing are likely limited. Fortunately, he has compiled a wealth of works to be explored and I am very much looking forward to reading them.

Highly recommended. 4 stars

Linda- Fantastic review of To A Mountain In Tibet. I had not heard of Thubron before.
Were you interested in the Short Story Challenge? I did post the thread on the 75ers.

Thanks Mark. This is the first of Thubron's books that I have read and I am now anxious to read others. I know you are a lover of travel narratives also, so you may want to take a look.

I am definitely interested in the Short Story Challenge - just as soon as I catch up on my delinquent reviews - and will go check out the new thread.

Linda - I have read a few Thubron books before and I must say that your excellent review makes me want to revisit some of them soon.

Thanks Paul. Nice to see you!

I made my way over to your thread and wow! there is a lot to read here. Wonderful reviews of some great books, and I am in awe of your reporting on author's talks. I wish I could find time to attend more of those myself.

Hi Linda, thumb for your terrific review of To A Mountain in Tibet. That's going straight to the WL.

>144 AnneDC: Welcome Anne, and thanks. I love attending the author talks, after so many years of also not having the time. Retirement is a wonderful thing!

>145 brenzi: Thanks Bonnie. I think you would enjoy it. It was a library e-book and I feel kind of sad that it's not there anymore to refer back to.

Cloudsplitter by Russell Banks

What I expected from Cloudsplitter was historical fiction about the famous abolitionist, John Brown. What I found was a masterful exploration of the relationship between two men, an extraordinary father and his ambivalent son, and their unrelenting struggles - within themselves, with each other, and with a nation that allows the enslavement of human beings.

Cloudsplitter is narrated by John Brown’s third son, Owen, who chronicles his life with his famous father for a biographical researcher. In an Author’s Note, Banks emphasizes that this novel is “a work of the imagination” and “should be read solely as a work of fiction, not as a version or interpretation of history”. Although following the main historical threads of John Brown’s life and anti-slavery activities, there are moments of divergence from fact and much added that is speculative and pure invention. But this seems largely irrelevant to Banks’ broader purpose.

John Brown is a complex figure whose single-minded opposition to slavery is both driven and marred by contradictions. Married twice and fathering twenty children, only eleven of whom survive to adulthood, Brown is devoted to his family, but extreme in his expectations of them.

Compared to the rest of us, no matter how hotly burned our individual flame, Father’s was a conflagration. He burned and burned, ceaselessly, it seemed, and though we were sometimes scorched by his flame, we were seldom warmed by it.

Highly religious, Brown imposes his own interpretation of God’s will in a harsh and severe manner. While intolerant of those who do not meet his strict Christian standards, his own version of faith inexplicably justifies the use of violence to advance his abolitionist cause. Historians have long debated whether John Brown was insane or simply a religious fanatic, a terrorist or a hero. But regardless, at the core of his character is a massive egotism that drives his failed ambition to amass great wealth and ultimately leads him to sacrifice his family and martyr himself to his abolitionist cause.

By comparison, Owen Brown is plagued by doubts. He lacks the unquestioning religious faith of his father and exhibits a rebellious temperament, driven by a desire to find a place and purpose in life that is missing for him. Despite these conflicting emotions, Owen is unable to separate from his father, eventually embracing his fanaticism and becoming his closest advisor and co-conspirator in their final acts of battle. Yet he secretly bears the guilt and responsibility for the accidental death of a freed slave and friend, and carries the crushing knowledge that he is himself not without prejudice and bigotry. And of all the family members, it is Owen that is most aware that his father is flawed, and not the prophet that his followers believe him to be.

They all thought me shy, inarticulate, perhaps not as intelligent as they, as they always had anyhow, and they were not wrong. But that did not mean that I did not know the truth about Father and why he did the great, good things and the bad, and why so much of what he did was, at bottom, horrendous, shocking, was wholly evil.

The storyline focuses on the decades prior to the 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry, exploring in-depth the development of John Brown’s abolitionist rage while only tangentially addressing the historical significance of this seminal event and its aftermath. Intricately plotted, the narrative follows the Browns through years of harsh conditions and hard work, marked by births and deaths. The family’s 1850 move to North Elba in the Adirondack Mountains is a turning point in their lives - a time of active participation in transporting runaway slaves to safety across the Canadian border, while evading slave-catchers and federal authorities. John and Owen Brown travel extensively during subsequent years, both for business purposes and to seek the support of wealthy abolitionists. During one such trip to Boston, Owen’s sense of faith and purpose are ignited by the excitement of danger and he is “brushed by an angel of the Lord”. His father’s resolve for militant action is strengthened by what he sees as the passivity of Boston’s prominent abolitionists and he develops elaborate plans to establish Kansas as a slavery-free state and to cause the collapse of Virginia’s economy by promoting an armed insurrection of slaves. But in the end, John Brown commits and condones horrific and wholly unnecessary acts of violence, culminating in a failed, armed attack on the federal armory at Harpers Ferry.

Russell Banks has a gift for creating multi-dimensional characters and placing them in real settings and situations. In Cloudsplitter, he reveals the complexities and contradictions inherent in the story of John Brown, while touching on important questions regarding the nature of faith, family, and the ways in which we are enslaved by our beliefs and ambitions. Banks writes in a voice that is both lyrical and stunning in its realism, using language consistent both with the period and with the religious fanaticism of John Brown. Never straying from Owen’s voice, Banks brings the reader into the mind of his narrator with an intensity that sustained my interest through the more than 750 pages of this incredible novel.

Highly recommended. 5 stars

Wow, Linda, you just plunked two books on the ol' wishlist! I haven't read anything by Russell Banks and didn't think I wanted to read about John Brown...until your review. I love travel narratives. That one has an exquisite cover so I'm going to try and get a "real" copy through ILL. When I get caught up with my planned reads, that is ;-). Thanks?!

Wow! That is quite a review! You obviously enjoyed Cloudsplitter, and you've made me want to read it too. Onto the wish list it goes!

#147 Great review of Cloudsplitter. I was all ready to add it to the wishlist till the more than 750 pages in the final sentence. I suppose I'd better add it anyway - maybe one day I'll have more reading time!

Terrific review.

#147 - Great review! That will be my next Russell Banks novel.

>148 Donna828: Hi Donna. So glad I could tempt you with both! Russell Banks is a fabulous writer (although in truth, I didn't care for and didn't finish The Reserve, but have loved everything else so far...). I think it was Bonnie who said he would be doing an author talk in her area this Fall. I saw him a few years ago before I had read any of his books. Wish I could see him now, as I would have many more questions to ask.

>149 AnneDC: I hope it surfaces on your WL some day, Anne. Thanks!

>150 SandDune: Thanks Rhian. I won't tell you how long it sat on my TBR pile before I finally took the plunge. It did take awhile, as I was reading about four other things at the same time. But it was certainly worth it.

>151 ffortsa: Thanks Judy.

Excellent review of Cloudspitter, Linda. That's definitely one for the wish list.

Linda - I have Cloudsplitter on the shelves and have wanted to start it for a while. It has had several positive reviews that I have seen but never one so cogently and authoritatively written.

> 154 Thanks Darryl.

> 155 Thanks so much for the nice compliment, Paul. I struggled in writing this review, as there is so much to the book, and I am still thinking of things that I wish I had included! I think you would really enjoy it, especially as you have said you are a Russell Banks fan.

You temptress you. I think I mentioned somewhere Linda that I tried Cloudsplitter years ago and had to give up on it not because it didn't interest me---it did---but I think it was at a time in my life when I didn't have the time to devote to it that it deserved. I'll be reading it now especially since Russell Baker is going to be speaking here in October. Oh and thumb for that excellent review.

Thanks Bonnie. It does take some time and attention to read, but it is well worth it. Did you mean Russell Banks? I think so, as I remember you mentioning that before. You must go see him. He's a great speaker and very down to earth.

Linda- Fantastic review of Cloudsplitter. Sadly, I've had this one on the shelf FOREVER and I love Banks. Go figure. Have you read The Sweet Hereafter? It's still my favorite of his.
BTW- A nice companion piece to Cloudsplitter is Midnight Rising which I read the end of last year. Good stuff.

Thanks Mark. You really should pull this one off the shelf. I read The Sweet Hereafter earlier this year and loved it (my review is #21 above). I also really liked The Darling and his collection of short stories, The Angel on the Roof. But I think Cloudsplitter is his masterpiece. I actually own Midnight Rising, which I bought after seeing Tony Horwitz speak last year. But I made a conscious decision to read Banks' novel before the nonfiction accounts.

I would love to read his short stories. I added it to my WL, after hearing about it, (for the 1st time) a couple months ago. The film version of The Sweet Hereafter is outstanding too.

Great review of Cloudsplitter. I've had that one on my bookshelf longer than I care to remember. Your review has it calling to me.

>158 Linda92007: Oh yeah...Russell Banks. Haha. I have read a memoir by Russell Baker, many years ago. Who knows why that popped in my head.

>162 arubabookwoman: Thanks, Deborah. Apparently there are far too many copies of Cloudsplitter just gathering dust. I hope you read and enjoy it!

Linda- I know it's silly but the size of a book does intimidate me a little and I can easily keep stepping over the hefty ones. I think it's just me being book-greedy.

Not silly at all Mark. The length was probably the reason it sat on my shelf also for years before I read it. But you could take your time with it and read it along-side other books. After all, you've enticed me to participate in your group read of IQ84. Talk about hefty ones! :)

147: Probably not for me, or not now, but you sure make a compelling case.

I always welcome your visits, Katherine, even if I can't tempt you!

Human Chain by Seamus Heaney

“Had I Not Been Awake”

Had I not been awake I would have missed it,
A wind that rose and whirled until the roof
Pattered with quick leaves off the sycamore

And got me up, the whole of me a-patter,
Alive and ticking like an electric fence:
Had I not been awake I would have missed it,

It came and went so unexpectedly
And almost it seemed dangerously,
Returning like an animal to the house,

A courier blast that there and then
Lapsed ordinary. But not ever
After. And not now.

I love this opening to the latest collection of the Irish Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney, Human Chain. These are verses imbued with the memories that have often been the subject and inspiration for his poetry, yet they feel differently than those of his younger self. Viewed now through the losses brought by age, infirmity and death, these reflections are clearly the venue of the older poet.

Heaney uses a deceptively simple language and form that seems a suitable testament to the everyday nature of his subjects, presented in concrete, concise and often masculine imagery. He shares moments that are both foreign to me in their representation of rural Irish life of an earlier age, while still feeling strongly familiar in their universality. I am not qualified to critique poetry, much less that of a Nobel Laureate. So there is nothing I can better do than to let the words speak for themselves.

“Album” witnesses, through the memories of childhood, the strength and partnership of his parents: “Too late, alas, now for the apt quotation / About a love that’s proved by steady gazing / Not at each other but in the same direction (10-12).”

In “The Butts”, memories of the changing relationship between an elderly father and his son are revisited:

And we must learn to reach well in beneath
Each meager armpit
To lift and sponge him,
……………………………………………..
Closer than anybody liked
But having, for all that,
To keep working. (25-27, 31-33)

In “Uncoupled”, the foreshadowing of a father’s death: “Shouting among themselves, and now to him / So that his eyes leave mine and I know / The pain of loss before I know the term (22-24).”

Others are written in memory of friends lost. From “The Door Was Open and the House Was Dark”: “The door was open and the house was dark / Wherefore I called his name, although I knew / The answer this time would be silence (1-3).”

A powerful and highly recommended collection. 4 ½ stars

Stepping Stones: Interviews With Seamus Heaney by Dennis O’Driscoll

Out of the many books written on the poetry of Irish Nobel Laureate, Seamus Heaney, I selected this as one that might provide a broader context to my reading of his work. O’Driscoll’s book consists of an extensive series of interview questions, organized by chapters that mainly correspond to Heaney’s poetry collections, beginning with Death of a Naturalist (1966) and ending with District and Circle (2006). Published in 2008, it briefly touches upon his August 2006 stroke that features prominently in his most recent volume, Human Chain. Stepping Stones took seven years to reach publication, with Heaney responding to O’Driscoll’s questions primarily in writing through the mail. In his introduction, O’Driscoll describes the book as biographical, but it is more accurately a blending of biography and autobiography, with the guiding hand of O’Driscoll as interviewer and the true content found in Heaney’s response.

This book does not pretend to be an authorized ‘reader’s guide’ to Seamus Heaney’s poems, but rather a survey of his life, often using the poems as reference points. It offers a biographical context for the poems and a poetry-based account of the life. It reviews the life by re-viewing it from the perspective of Heaney’s late sixties…

Born in 1939 on a farm in County Derry, Northern Ireland, Heaney’s family was part of the Catholic minority. The interviews trace in detail his life and the influences of people, places and events on his poetry, including his school and college years, his marriage and family life, university lectureships and readings at home and abroad, and his receipt of the 1995 Nobel Prize for Literature. Themes of rural life, early childhood, family life, and the Troubles are recurrent throughout. Heaney also devotes considerable attention to the many poets, both predecessors and contemporaries, whom he admires and was influenced by, crediting Ted Hughes with having inspired his earliest interest in poetry. While not intended as an analysis of his works, Heaney does frequently reference both collections and specific poems in the context of their settings, sources and inspirations. In the end, I am left with the impression of Heaney as a man, who while extraordinary in his literary accomplishments, is refreshingly quite ordinary in his origins, daily life and sources of poetic inspiration.

This is a book that is dense with detail and reflection. I read it in its lengthy entirety, although I was several times tempted to give up. While I would not hesitate to recommend it to admirers of Heaney’s poetry, I found the question-answer format wearisome for a book of nearly 500 pages (including addendums), and its full appreciation seemed to require a knowledge that I did not have. Although including a brief glossary of terms, several maps, and more extensive chronological and bibliographical glossaries, it otherwise lacks supplemental explanations and presumes an understanding of Irish culture, vernacular, traditions, politics and historical events, as well as a close familiarity with Heaney’s work and a broad background in poetry.

I am highly ambivalent about my rating of this book. Torn between the limits of its accessibility for myself as an unprepared reader and its merits as an enlightening account of Heaney’s life and literary contributions, I have chosen to emphasize the latter, despite having done no justice to these virtues here. My hope is to someday return to the relevant chapters of Stepping Stones, having spent more time with Heaney’s poems and ready for a deeper understanding of their origins in the author’s life.

4 stars

Thanks for both of these reviews of Heaney material.

I've been very much out of poetry mode for years, but I do have a collection of Heaney's work, and his translation of Beowulf (which I did read). Your review reminds me that there is great pleasure in reading poetry, provided you can still the general hubbub of the ordinary days. Must make that work for me soon.

I'm late getting here but I thumbed both of those reviews Linda. I give you all the credit in the world for plowing through Stepping Stones but I don't think I'll be adding it for just the reasons you cite. 500 pages of questions and answers? Oh my.

Linda I have Heaney's Selected Poems 1966-1987 which certainly rewards one's reflective moments. Deceptively arch and crafty phrase-smith whilst not a waster of words. Like my verse to rhyme generally by in Heaney I am oftentimes prepared to make exception.

>171 ffortsa: Did you write a review of Beowulf, Judy? I think I remember seeing one, although I'm not finding it on the work page. I also recently bought Heaney's translation, but haven't gotten to it yet.

I find poetry can be a nice break from other forms of literature - a totally different type of reading experience. Sometimes I need that more contemplative time.

>172 brenzi: Thanks Bonnie. Late or not, it's always nice to see you.

>173 PaulCranswick: I hope you'll try some of Heaney's later collections also, Paul. Maybe Human Chain will jump off the shelf on your next bookstore visit? From what I've read so far, I think I prefer his more "mature" work.

Nope, Linda, no review. I'm trying to recall the impetus for reading it, because I have had it for while.

Early Reviewer Book
The Sadness of the Samurai: A Novel by Victor del Arbol

This Early Reviewer book, the first of the prize-winning Victor del Arbol’s novels to be translated to English, was described as a literary, historical thriller. Unfortunately, it failed to deliver on each of these points.

Maria Bengoechea is an ambitious prosecuting attorney who, having successfully imprisoned a police inspector for corruption and torture of an informant, is drawn into an effort to reunite him with his kidnapped daughter. Isabel Mola is an aristocrat in pro-Nazi Spain of the 1940s, who is betrayed by her illicit lover while attempting to escape her powerful and abusive husband. Congressman Publio, a former “watchdog” for Isabel’s husband, Guillermo Mola, is consumed by his lust for power and will use any means to promote himself and a planned coup against the democratic government. The fates of these three individuals are tied together by events that begin in 1941 and culminate in the failed fascist coup of February 23, 1981.

Victor del Arbol has missed an opportunity to craft what might have been a truly intriguing historical thriller. Having chosen a fascinating period of Spanish history as the setting for his novel, he fails to take advantage of this rich historical background and incorporates actual events to only a limited extent. He populates his story with an array of potentially complex characters, then presents them as stereotypes, poorly developed and difficult to care about. The storyline moves smoothly back and forth between historical periods, but perhaps too much so, as there are few loose ends to engage the reader’s mind. And while the subplots provide the requisite twists, full of corruption and intrigue, they are lacking in suspense and generally felt formulaic.

In fairness, the book was not altogether terrible. It made for an easy, relaxing read that succeeded in vaguely holding my interest, as I was certain that the major plot twist must be just around the corner. But alas, it ended as clearly foreshadowed in the first chapter, and without surprises.

2 1/2 Stars

Hi Linda- Sorry, your ER book failed to deliver. Hope your next one is a whole lot better. Did you have a nice holiday weekend?

Good to see you, Mark. We did have a nice weekend, thank you, mostly spent traveling to visit my 90 year old mother. I finished two books in the process, both on the drive and while visiting. Reading is the one activity we can still share. She remains mentally sharp and gets all of her book recommendations from me!

Fishing the Sloe-Black River by Colum McCann

These are tales heavy with loss, grounded in life’s heartbreaking moments, yet buoyant in their inherent hopefulness. The twelve short stories in Colum McCann’s Fishing the Sloe-Black River are a true achievement of imagination and poignant effect. Ranging from harshly realistic to magical, the language and dialogue are deceptively simple, yet evocative. McCann is equally at home with settings in his native Ireland and his adopted United States, and creates characters that we know, ordinary and flawed, yet unfailingly dignified in the face of life events that are both familiar and unimaginable.

Some perform simple, personal acts of courage and remembrance. In A Basket Full of Wallpaper, a reclusive Japanese émigré to Ireland, imagined by his young employee to be a survivor of Hiroshima, finds peace in his obsession with hanging wallpaper. Breakfast for Enrique conveys a quietness of waiting, as a man employed as a fish-gutter prepares breakfast for his very ill lover. In Step We Gaily, On We Go an elderly boxer, slipping into senility, steals articles of women’s clothing, imagining them to be gifts for his wife. The small, daily acts undertaken for loved ones are portrayed in A Word in Edgewise, as a woman rambles on while helping her sister with her hair and make-up, one final time. And in the book’s title story, Fishing the Sloe-Black River, mothers fish in a futile effort to catch sons who have drifted away, while their aging husbands play football on a team in need of younger recruits.

Others struggle more outwardly. In Sisters, a woman bitter from years of promiscuity, illegally enters the United States to visit her dangerously ill sister, a nun who suffers from severe anorexia and self-abuse. In Along the Riverwall, a bicyclist who is confined to a wheelchair after being hit by a bread truck, disposes of an unwanted gift. And in From Many, One, a woman’s obsession with painting quarters leads to her husband’s discovery of a disturbing secret.

Employees and residents of institutional settings find solace in their commonalities. In Through the Field, a maintenance worker at a State School for juvenile delinquents reacts in an unusual and puzzling manner after learning that a resident who committed murder turned himself in because he was afraid of the dark. Stolen Child is narrated by an Irish immigrant, who while working as a counselor at a NYC children’s home, develops a surrogate-father relationship with a blind resident and must accept her plans to marry an older, disabled Vietnam veteran. And in Around the Bend and Back Again, a maintenance worker at a psychiatric facility becomes involved with a patient, unwittingly assisting in her final, destructive act of revenge and freedom.

The closing story, Cathal’s Lake, is simply heartrending. A farmer’s lake is overflowing with swans, as he is cursed to dig these stately birds out of the soil, one for each person dead from sectarian violence.

This is one of the most consistently excellent short story collections that I have read. What I loved the most was that each story, while complete in itself, leaves a space to be filled by the reader’s own imagination, interpretation and memories.

4 ½ Stars

Ohh that McCann book sounds really good and I so loved Let the Great World Spin Linda. That's definitely one for the WL. Sorry your ER book didn't work out for you. They're always such a gamble, aren't they?

Fishing the Sloe Black River sounds very good. I'm getting so many recommendations from your thread.

179: You've renewed my interest in reading more by McCann, Linda. I have Dancer on the TBR shelf. Have you read that one?

I hope you had a good visit with your mother. My mother is no longer with us. Yesterday would have been her 90th birthday so she was very much on my mind. I got my love of reading from her.

What's up next in your reading life?

>180 brenzi: Hi Bonnie. The first story in the collection actually reminded me of Let the Great World Spin as there are similarities with some of the characters.

I just started trying for ERs in March and am beginning to see that they can be a gamble. Although my second win was The Hunger Angel by Herta Muller, which I received yesterday. I'm excited about that, but unfortunately no wins for May. How about you?

>181 SandDune: I hope the recommendations turn out to be good ones for you, Rhian!

>182 Donna828: Hi Donna. I love McCann and I also have Dancer on the TBR shelf. Not sure why I haven't gotten to it yet. So many books that I sometimes just forget what's there.

I'm sorry to hear you no longer have your mother with you. I did have a good visit with mine, thanks, although every time I see her she seems a bit more frail. But luckily she is still able to manage okay at home.

>182 Donna828: Sorry, I didn't finish answering your question, Donna. Last week I finished Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita and have a number of books in progress: The Naive and Sentimental Novelist by Orhan Pamuk, Mentors, Muses & Monsters: 30 Writers on the People Who Changed Their Lives by Elizabeth Benedict, and a few short poetry anthologies. I have also just barely started Sea of Poppies, but may put that aside until after my new ER book. I was going to try for Mark's River of Smoke GR, but I don't think I can handle that this month.

Excellent and enticing review of Fishing the Sloe-Black River, Linda; that's definitely one for the wish list.

Linda- Great review of Fishing the Sloe-Black River. I'm also a big fan of Let the Great World Spin and NEED to read more of this guy's work. If you don't mind, you should post this review over on the SS thread. It's been slow over there and this would brighten things up.

>185 kidzdoc: Thanks Darryl. It is a wonderful collection.

>186 msf59: Thanks Mark. I just posted it on the SS thread. Anything for you. :)

Since Paul has gotten everyone involved in putting together lists of favorite fiction first published in the 2000s, I thought I would give it a try. In doing so, I have realized that most of what I have read in recent years is a bit older, so I may develop a second list from the decade of the 90's. This list will also likely change considerably in 2012 due to books I am currently reading or have on top of my TBR pile.

My top 10 (in no particular order):

Desert by J. M. G. LeClezio
Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann
The Broken Word by Adam Foulds (narrative poem)
The Known World by Edward P. Jones
The Wandering Falcon by Jamil Ahmad
No Great Mischief by Alister MacLeod
Great House by Nicole Krauss
Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age by Kenzaburo Oe

>183 Linda92007: I'm excited about that, but unfortunately no wins for May. How about you? Well of course my biggest win was Bring Up the Bodies in April but I'm also looking forward to my May win, Juliet in August which won Canada's prestigious Governour General's Award. The Muller win was a good one for you. I may end up reading that one if you give it a favorable review.

>188 Linda92007: Lots of my favorites are on your list too. I read and enjoyed The Known World when it won the Pulitzer (that was one of the years they awarded the prize, LOL). And No Great Mischief was really good too. I probably should have included that one. So hard narrowing the list, isn't it. I still haven't gotten to Great House.

#179 - Fishing the Sloe-Black River sounds fantastic! Wonderful review as well. I'll put that on my wishlist and may read it this year, as I'm trying to read more short story collections.

Thanks Kerri. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Nice top 10 list, Linda. I loved both Desert and The Broken Word, which both deserve honorable mention just outside of my list.

Linda- I like your List! 3 I have not heard of, but I loved the McCann and I agree the Known world is excellent and completely under-appreciated. I NEED to get to Wolf Hall.

Good idea Linda - I will also prepare my 1990's list. You are also right that the list will always very much be works in progress due to the amount of new books being read on recommendation which would normally require a previous pick to get ousted.

>192 kidzdoc: I think that I may have learned about both Desert and Wandering Falcon from you, Darryl. You are always a great source of books.

I would love to read more narrative poetry of the quality of The Broken Word, but I just don't seem to come across it. I wish Adam Foulds would write more of it. Other than the standard classics (Iliad, Odyssey, Beowulf etc.) have you encountered any that you would recommend?

>189 brenzi: Hi Bonnie. Didn't mean to skip over you! So far, The Hunger Angel is excellent. Juliet in August looks great also, so I'll be interested in your review. For some reason, I tend to enjoy Canadian literature. I'm always interested in the Giller prize nominees, although sometimes the books seem to take forever to became available in the US. That reminds me that I need to take an updated look at the longlist for 2011.

>193 msf59:, Mark, I gave Paul credit for the favorite books list craze, but am now remembering that you were the one who actually started it. I agree that you NEED to read Wolf Hall and more Colum McCann. And I'm sure we could come up with a few others if we tried!

>194 PaulCranswick: But you did promote the books list craze to the point that even I relented, so I guess you can share the credit, Paul. :)

>195 Linda92007: Regarding narrative poetry, two books come to mind right away: I Love a Broad Margin to My Life by Maxine Hong Kingston, and a book I read last month, The Undertaker's Daughter by Toi Derricotte, which were both superb. I'll have to look for more books in this genre.

Thanks Darryl. I'll look for both of them.

Fishing the Sloe Black River goes onto the wish list! It sounds wonderful.

I enjoyed also your Heaney reviews up above. I read The Human Chain last year and love that you highlighted some of the parts that struck me the most at the time--in fact I think my favorite line from the whole collection, you quoted--Too late, alas, now for the apt quotation / About a love that’s proved by steady gazing / Not at each other but in the same direction (10-12). A lot of his poems I felt were wasted on me but there were also many lovely ones.

Hi Anne. Good to see you! I'm so glad to hear that you have also read Human Chain and connected with some of the same lines. The one you cite is wonderful, and from one of my favorites in that collection. I have found Heaney to be a poet I have to really work at, but very worthwhile when it finally clicks!

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov



The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

‘…who are you then?’
‘I am part of that power which eternally wills evil and eternally works good.’
-Goethe, Faust

This exchange between Faust and Mephistopheles sets the stage for a novel that is at the same time marvelous fun, a satirical criticism of the Soviet Union of Mikhail Bulgakov’s era, and a provocative commentary on the nature of good and evil.

The book unfolds through three intertwined storylines, each taking place between Wednesday and Saturday night of the Christian Holy Week. Set in “present day” Moscow of the 1930s, the story opens with the poet, Ivan “Homeless” Nikolaevich and his editor, Mikhail Berlioz, in conversation regarding the existence of Jesus Christ. They are joined by a mysterious stranger, Woland, who insists he was present at Jesus’ crucifixion and predicts Berlioz’s imminent death by decapitation. Later revealed to be the devil, Woland proceeds to wreck merry havoc on Moscow, accompanied by a bizarre and dangerous group of assistants, including an immense tomcat named Behemoth that talks and walks upright. Unable to convince anyone of what he has witnessed, Ivan Nikolaevich is taken to a mental institution and diagnosed as schizophrenic. There the second storyline emerges, as Ivan meets the Master, who tells him of his beautiful but married lover, Margarita. In return for being reunited with the Master, Margarita allows herself to become a witch and presides over Woland's satanic ball. The Master is the author of an unfinished novel that provides the third storyline, based on the familiar biblical account of Pontius Pilate as he condemns Yeshua Ha-Nozri (Jesus of Nazareth) to death by crucifixion. The three storylines converge at the end, with Woland orchestrating the final fates of the Master and Margarita, who in turn set Pilate free from his purgatory of insomnia and return Ivan Nikolaevich to a peaceful, scholarly existence.

The Master and Margarita can be read and appreciated on many levels. It contains more hidden references and symbolism than any other book I recall having read, much of which I would have missed if not for the translator’s introduction and notes, various websites and the support of a group read. But to Bulgakov’s credit, it is a joy to read even in the absence of expert analysis. In fact, I found it most captivating when I allowed myself to be swept along by the narrative, reflecting on its meaning only in retrospect.

Despite the pervasiveness of biblical references, the most obvious of Bulgakov’s purposes is to criticize Stalin and the Soviet bureaucracy. He accomplishes this indirectly through the use of magic realism and fantastical imagery, touching upon issues of shortages, foreign currency, government terrorism, and official corruption. The ideas presented in Pontius Pilate’s tale parallel the “present day” issues, while also introducing the much repeated theme that 'cowardice is the most terrible of vices’. According to translator Richard Pevear’s introduction, Bulgakov struggled with his own sense of guilt for compromising with the Soviet bureaucracy. He therefore likely identified strongly with Pilate, who had also made compromises that he regretted. In this context, I found it is interesting that Bulgakov forgives Pilate in the end and sends him off to his greatest reward.

Integrated throughout the novel, and of greatest interest to me, was an overarching premise that is timeless and applicable to all societies – that good and evil are coexistent and that both are necessary in our world.

Kindly consider the question: what would your good do if evil did not exist, and what would the earth look like if shadows disappeared from it? Shadows are cast by objects and people. Here is the shadow of my sword. Trees and living beings also have shadows. Do you want to skin the whole earth, tearing all the trees and living things off it, because of your fantasy of enjoying bare light? You’re a fool.

To label this a review feels wrong as it implies that I have a much deeper understanding of Bulgakov and his masterpiece than I actually do. This is a book that begs for another read, deeper and more analytical, and I hope someday to return to it.

5 Stars

I read The Master and Margerita a few years ago, but quite quickly as I had to finish it for my book club and I definitely missed a lot of the symbolism that you're talking about. While I did really enjoy it I also felt like you that it warranted a slower, more thoughtful reading.

Hi Rhian. It's hard to catch all the symbolism and references in the book, as Bulgakov can be very subtle and much of it is specific to the history and culture of the Soviet Union. I would like to read an in-depth critical analysis of the book before going back for a second read. There is so much to it and I think that being able to make the connections while reading would enhance my enjoyment.

Linda, I loved your thoughts on The Master and Margarita. I estimate that I got perhaps 50% of the allusions and symbolism yet I still enjoyed the book. I agree wholeheartedly with your last sentence. The book sits on my RR shelf waiting for its second, more thoughtful, reading.

Thanks Donna. 50% strikes me as doing very well! I would not have come anywhere close to that if I hadn't read this as part of an LT Group Read. But one of the things I loved about Bulgakov's writing was that I think you could enjoy it without getting any of the symbolism.

#202 - Great review of The Master and Margarita. I haven't read it yet, but am hoping to get to more Russian classics next year (and maybe some strange Soviet sci-fi as well). I've read a good deal of Dostoevsky and a bit of Tolstoy, but that's about it.

You've piqued my curiosity, Kerri. What are some examples of strange Soviet sci-fi?

Linda- Excellent review of The Master and Margarita. Sadly, I'm very under-read as far as Russian literature goes. Bad Mark. Was this an easy read or were there challenging moments?

Just came from thumbing that terrific review of The Master and Margarita Linda. I still haven't read it but hope to get to it sometime soon.

It's actually an easy and very entertaining read, Mark, and I think you would love it. What is quite challenging is trying to decipher all of Bulgakov's themes, references and symbolism, which would deepen your appreciation, but is not completely essential. I think a second read may be necessary anyway, if that is your goal. My recommendation is to just go for it and maybe read some basic analyses alongside it. There are plenty of such websites to be found and I think most editions will have an intro and notes. There are also two threads (Part I and Part II) on Club Read from a recent group read that you might find helpful.

Thanks Linda! I will add it to my WL. I know other LTers have loved it too!

Linda - great review of The Master and Margarita - reminds me that I should bump it up my reading list.

I found a used copy of M&M last year, but doubt it's the new translation with the notes you speak of. I may have to look around again.

Hi Mark, Paul and Judy! I do hope you all get around to reading it. If not for the group read, I probably would have left it sitting for some time, but I'm glad I didn't.

Judy, I read the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation on my Kindle. The introduction was helpful and the notes were easy to navigate. But I have no sense of the differences between the various translations.

#208 - Well, I haven't read any yet, but I have a couple Alexei Tolstoy novels in my TBR pile: The Garin Death Ray and Aelita. So I'll start there and see how it goes.

The War Works Hard by Dunya Mikhail

Born into the tyranny of Ba'athist Iraq in 1965, Dunya Mikhail grew up in a period of severe repression, worked for the Baghdad Observer, and fled her country after being placed on Saddam Hussein’s enemies list. Emigrating to the United States in 1996, Mikhail was awarded the 2001 UN Human Rights Award for Freedom of Writing. The War Works Hard, translated from Arabic by Elizabeth Winslow, won the 2004 Pen Translation Fund Award and was short-listed for the 2006 Griffin International Poetry Prize.

The poems in this collection were written between 1984 and 2004, both while Mikhail was living in Iraq and following her arrival in the United States. The language and images are straight-forward and simple. While not subtle or sophisticated, these poems clearly portray the emotional experience of living in a country torn by years of wars, and later observed from a distance as an émigré. Mikhail's personal reactions are always present, sometimes gentle and sometimes harsh.

Non-Military Statements

I thank everyone I don’t love.
They don’t cause me heartache;
they don’t make me write long letters;
they don’t disturb my dreams.
I don’t wait for them anxiously;
I don’t read their horoscopes in magazines;
I don’t dial their numbers;
I don’t think of them.
I thank them a lot.
They don’t turn my life upside down. (19-28)

Three major wars have been fought in Iraq during Mikhail’s lifetime and one can trace her growth as a vocal critic of war, through the subtlety or directness of the imagery in her poetry. The earliest poems included in this collection are for the most part quiet and subdued, as in Pronouns.

He plays a train.
She plays a whistle.
They move away.

He plays a rope.
She plays a tree.
They swing.

He plays a dream.
She plays a feather.
They fly.

He plays a general.
She plays people.
They declare war.

Her later verse is filled with irony and seems to condemn equally all parties to war. Her criticism of America as her adopted country is evident in America - “What good is it to gain the whole world/if you lose your soul, America?” - and in An Urgent Call, based on the case of Lynndie England, an army reservist involved in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. The title poem, The War Works Hard, written but not published while the author lived in Baghdad, confronts directly the devastating effects of war.

How magnificent the war is!
How eager
and efficient!
Early in the morning,
it wakes up the sirens
and dispatches ambulances
to various places,
swings corpses through the air,
rolls stretchers to the wounded,
summons rain
from the eyes of mothers,
digs into the earth
dislodging many things
from under the ruins…
Some are lifeless and glistening,
others are pale and still throbbing…
It produces the most questions in the minds of children, (1-18)

The pain of leaving one’s country is clearly visible in those poems composed following Mikhail’s emigration to the United States, such as I Was In A Hurry.

Yesterday I lost a country,
I was in a hurry,
and didn’t notice when it fell from me
Like a broken branch from a forgetful tree. ( 1-4)

One of the most moving poems in the collection is Bag of Bones, composed in the United States following the fall of Saddam Hussein, but having the immediacy of what feels like personal experience.

What good luck!
She has found his bones.
The skull is also in the bag
The bag in her hand
Like all other bags
In all other trembling hands.
His bones, like thousands of bones
In the mass graveyard,
………………………………………….
What does it mean to die all this death
in a place where the darkness plays all this silence?
What does it mean to meet your loved ones now
with all of these hollow places?
To give back to your mother
on the occasion of death
a handful of bones
she had given to you
on the occasion of birth? (1-8, 23-31)

I deeply respect Mikhail for her courage as an Iraqi woman who used her poetry as a vehicle to express dangerous political views. But as much as I enjoyed parts of this collection, I also found it overall to be somewhat simplistic and obvious. I generally prefer poetry that makes me work a little harder.

3 ½ Stars

I have been inspired by Darryl (kidzdoc) and other completists to undertake a personal challenge of reading at least one book by each of the 108 winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature, assuming the availability of translations. This will take me a few years, as I will not read exclusively from this list, but I do have a slight jump-start on the process. I will be setting up my list in the next few days and am excited to get started.

Wow. Do you plan to post your list, or at least a link to it? I'd be interested in seeing if it's feasible to join you.

I will post some kind of list, somehow, somewhere Judy. I'm still contemplating the best approach to that, but leaning towards just dividing it up over a few messages on my thread. In the meantime, if you want to take a look at the full list of Nobel Laureates in Literature, here's a link. I'd welcome your company!

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates

thanks. I found the link after I posted (duh, there I was on the computer anyway...), and was pleased to see how many authors i've read at least once. But oh, those authors whose writing language isn't English! I'm seriously provincial. Must remediate.

Wow you've set yourself a very challenging, er, challenge Linda. I'm not sure I could complete it. I just went to look at the list and I've only read a few of the authors. I've read most of the Booker and Orange Prize winners and many of the Pulitzer and National Book Award winners but haven't tackled many of the Nobel winners.

That is a wildly ambitious plan! I thought about doing a Nobel Prize category next year where I pull one name per month out of a hat, but I'm probably going to focus on the Booker winners instead.

Hi Bonnie and Kerri! Not being quite as obsessive as some others, I plan to give myself whatever time I need to complete this. I was actually surprised to see that I have already read something by 23 of the 108 winners (and yes, they count!), although some were long ago and deserve a re-visit. By quick count, I also have at least 12 others sitting on my TBR pile, as well as multiple reads for some. I am most concerned about how many I will be unable to find in translation, but haven't fully researched that yet.

Linda- Good luck with your Nobel Laureates project. I've only read a small hand-full of these authors, so I should jot a few down. I'll be watching for your thoughts.

Linda - love these sorts of challenges - my own one next year will be to read a book from every year since Trafalgar 1812-2012 - 201 books. I havent managed 200 books in a year since my college days and it will take some planning. If I beat it I may try to go all the back to 1800. I had noticed that I have an unbroken sequence already from 1812 already but it would be a kick to do it all in the same year!

>225 msf59: Hi Mark! I am certain that you would find much of interest among the Nobel Laureates. Hopefully I will tempt you with a few.

>226 PaulCranswick: Wow, Paul. That sounds like an incredible challenge. 201 books, plus 12? I couldn't even come close to that in a year! I don't know how you do it, given your job and family responsibilities, not to mention one of the busiest LT threads. I'm tired just thinking about it.

Eternity on Hold by Mario Susko

the end is not where we want it
to be, the eyes playing tricks on us,
moving the horizon endlessly away

it is not what we imagine it
to be, the mind unable to lift
the weight of memory off the ground (Susko, 1-6)

---excerpt from “Death”

Mario Susko, a survivor of the Bosnian War, bears personal witness to the horror of that conflict in Eternity on Hold. The recipient of three Fulbright scholarships, Susko attended college at SUNY Stony Brook during the 1970s and returned to the United States in 1993, after war broke out in his home country. Susko is a prize-winning poet, translator and editor, has published prolifically, and is the recipient of the 1997 and 2006 Nassau Review Poetry Awards, the 1998 Nuove Lettere Premio Internazionale di Poesia e Letteratura, the 2000 Tin Ujevic Award for the best book of poems published in Croatia, and the 2003 SUNY Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities.

Although published more than a decade following Susko’s return to the United States, the poems in this collection mostly look back at his life in Bosnia. The collection begins with remembrances of parents and grandparents, and a child’s uncomprehending pain of their loss.

My grandfather died
sitting on a stone bench. Sent down
to fetch him, I walked around and stood
in front of him, but he still gazed
at the sea, his mouth half open
as if he wanted to tell me something. (1-6)

---excerpt from “Inheritance”

These youthful memories give way to highly personal images of wartime terror and death, and their lingering permeation of post-war life. The realism of the moments Susko captures is arresting and frightening. I sometimes found myself holding my breath in anticipation, as in “Beyond”, where a man seeks to learn if his lover has safely escaped a city’s checkpoint.

Eternity is God’s oblivion, you said,
a faint smile crossing your lips.
That’s why we are left with history,
not to forget what we cannot be. (1-4)

---excerpt from “Beyond”

At other times I was simply overcome with sadness at Susko’s portrayal of man’s capacity for cruelty and violence, and the burden borne by those who have survived. “Conversion”, short-listed for the 2004 Guardian Forward Poetry Prize, is a powerful poem that finds a distraught father in an encounter with a heavily armed man, while seeking his son in a field of dead bodies and grazing sheep.

I came upon a man in black who sat on a tank,
tending his sheep that grazed impassively
around the craters and among dead bodies.
I am looking for my son, I said squinting.
The bullets in his cartridge belt slung
over his shoulder shone in the sun like teeth. (1-6)

---excerpt from “Conversion”

I highly recommend this outstanding collection, both for its literary value and its importance as testimony to events that should not be forgotten. (4 1/2 stars)

The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist by Orhan Pamuk

In 2009, Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk joined an illustrious group of writers, artists, architects and musicians, invited by Harvard University to deliver the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, established as a lectureship on “poetry in the broadest sense”. In six essays based upon those lectures, Pamuk presents his theory of the novel, exploring the interaction between the creative contributions of both the author and the reader. As a framework for his theory, he borrows from Friedrich Schiller’s distinction between the “naïve poet”, whose writing is effortless, spontaneous and unrestrained by awareness of technique, and the “sentimental poet”, who is fully conscious of technique, reflective, self-aware and analytical. Pamuk contends that the most effective novelists and readers are those who are able to achieve a balance of being both naïve and sentimental.

”Novels are second lives”, the experience of which requires an interplay between the author’s words and the reader’s imagination, forming a mental image based on the written word. While character and plot are often viewed as being the most essential elements of fiction, Pamuk instead emphasizes the importance of the setting and the link between the objects described and the characters’ thoughts and feelings. He contends that a protagonist’s character is best revealed through how they view their environment, similar to how we come to know individuals in real life.

Pamuk recognizes that even great authors may be either more verbal or more visual in their writing, with fiction fulfilling an archival role related to language and speech, culture, feelings and attitudes. He argues, however, that art and fiction are ultimately both visual in nature, although the experience of viewing a painting and reading a novel are essentially different. Art is real and immediately understood, existing in space as a “frozen moment”. The fictional world exists as a series of connected moments, understood only in the unfolding of “dramatic time” and the interaction of the reader’s imagination with the author’s imagery. In this way, it is the reader who actually completes the story.

Pamuk disputes the contention, oft-repeated by authors and teachers of creative writing, that it is a novel’s characters that come alive and dictate the course of the storyline. Rather, he argues that what directs the novel is its “silent center”, the deeper purpose, meaning or insight that informs and enlarges upon the reader’s understanding of what it means to be alive in this world. The best fiction reflects a center that is distant from the story line and which continually changes, becoming more refined as the book develops, both for the author and the reader. “…Borges reminds us that the real subject and the center are something entirely different: ‘Page by page, the story grows until it takes on the dimensions of the cosmos’.”

Pamuk observes that“…the art of the novel draws its power from the absence of a perfect consensus between writer and reader…”. Each reader will experience the book and its center differently. “The power of a novel’s center ultimately resides not in what it is, but in our search for it as readers…. Both the center and the meaning of the novel change from one reader to the next. When we discuss the nature of the center…we are discussing our view of life.”

Pamuk presents his ideas in a very accessible fashion, describing his own development as a reader and novelist, and making frequent use of examples from the great classics, as well as from his own work. He also scatters captivating personal anecdotes throughout the lectures. For example, in the essay entitled “Museums and Novels”, he reveals his efforts to establish a museum in Istanbul, to house the enormous collection of objects he acquired as inspiration for writing The Museum of Innocence. And for anyone who has wondered why their own lives are not as rich and deeply felt as those depicted in fiction, Pamuk has a straightforward response.

Since I believe that the essential aim of the art of the novel is to present an accurate depiction of life, let me be forthright. People do not actually have as much character as we find portrayed in novels, especially in nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels. I am fifty-seven years old as I write these words. I have never been able to identify in myself the kind of character I encounter in novels – or rather, European novels. Furthermore, human character is not nearly as important in the shaping of our lives as it is made out to be in the novels and literary criticism of the West. To say that character-creation should be the primary goal of the novelist runs counter to what we know about everyday human life.

I found this book to be a delightful glimpse into the thoughts of a Nobel Laureate, whose views on writing fiction are refreshingly distinctive and resonated fully with me as a reader. Highly recommended. (4 ½ Stars)

Time to start a new thread. I haven't tried this before, so hopefully you can follow me!