Tag: fiction

#27 Moonglow by Michael Chabon

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26795307Michael Chabon was the first contemporary fiction author I read as a teenager. At 15 or 16, after reading mostly classics up until that point, I grabbed The Mysteries of Pittsburgh off my mom’s bookcase. I loved it. I was hooked. I went on, through the years, to read Wonderboys: Again, loved it. Werewolves in their Youth: Great. The Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Clay: Epic, again, loved it. I skipped The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, though I’m not sure why. And then Telegraph Avenue… Couldn’t finish it. I found the writing too forcefully “writerly.” I stumbled on overly wordy sentences and visuals that jarred me out of the book. I experienced some of this jarring, this lack of flow, with Moonglow. It took me four long days to get through, and I never fully lost myself in the story.

The story itself is a patchwork, with Chabon using his grandfather’s own history (growing up Jewish in Philadelphia, his experiences during WWII, meeting and marrying Chabon’s grandmother, his time in prison, his last years) as the foundation of the plot. As with any narrative of this kind, to tell it requires embellishment and the personal story is woven with fictions.

Moonglow is a dense, multi-layered book, and there’s so much I could write about it here: the wealth of moon/space references and allusions, the fascinating/frightening WWII passages, the function of memory in familial narrative and the stories we tell to survive, the effect of war and violence on the psyche… So while I didn’t lose myself in the story, while I struggled at times with the punchy oddness of word choice and felt like I had to work to reach the end, I give Moonglow high marks for evocative scenes, narrative structure, and historical scope.

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#26 Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

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20170404I don’t usually go for dystopian fiction. Oryx and Crake? Couldn’t get past page 30… In general, I just don’t love end-of-the-world hopelessness, desolate landscapes, and the constant fear that accompanies being one of the few survivors of an apocalyptic change, be it viral or chemical or other.

After so many recommendations and great reviews, however, I decided to pick up Station Eleven. Set in the lead-up and 20-year aftermath of a cataclysmic flu that wipes out much of Earth’s population, it follows various characters as they scatter and attempt to survive in the hours, days, and years after a performance of Shakespeare’s King Lear in Toronto.

In the years after the flu pandemic, we get visions of what the world is like from the perspective of Kirsten, one of the children in that production of King Lear in Toronto, who is now an adult player in a traveling symphony/theater that treks from one small enclave of survivors to another bringing music and Shakespearean theater. Post-pandemic, what used to be the U.S. is a place without electricity, planes, phones, the internet, without laws; cities are creepy monuments to a past civilization, full of skeletons, acres of abandoned cars on highways, looted stores and houses, and the echoes of half-realized lives. The visuals that Emily St. John Mandel creates of this world are memorable and terrifying, and it’s a fascinating, compulsive read.

The middle flagged a bit and I kept thinking move it along, move it along. I figured out the reveal pretty early on, and the ending was a bit too tidy and unrealistic for my taste, but overall I give it high marks for story, and character development… and for making me stay up, wide-eyed, two nights in a row imagining what it would be like to live in a Station Eleven world.

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#25 Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders

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Holy shit. This book. THIS BOOK! Lincoln in the Bardo just might be my favorite book of 2017 thus far.

The story takes place in the space of one night in 1862, a year after the start of the Civil War. President Lincoln’s son Willie, dead from typhoid fever, has just been buried in a cemetery in Georgetown. Lincoln, heartbroken over the death of his son, visits Willie’s tomb throughout the night and takes his son’s body out of the coffin so he that might see and hold him once more. He mourns his son, all the while carrying the knowledge and weight of all the deaths accumulating on the battlefields of the war.

Told by a chorus of graveyard inhabitants, and other voices of the period, Lincoln in the Bardo is unlike any other book I’ve read. The graveyard ensemble inhabits this Bardo (a Tibetan concept/word for a “transitional state”), where they welcome new arrivals like Willie, long for the lives they’ve left behind, mourn those they loved and lost, make friends, squabble, and linger with the souls interned around them. At the beginning I thought, is he really going to pull narrative structure off? And yes, he does. George Saunders has managed, brilliantly, to write a book about history, death, and letting go, that is hilarious, strange, and poignant, and that celebrates the smells, tastes, desires, and emotions of life. Bravo.

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#23 Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman

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When Richard Mayhew’s boring life in London gets turned inside out for helping a young girl named Door escape the two frightful men pursuing her, he is forced to go underground, literally, to survive. Following Door and her entourage through the tunnels and stations of the London underground, through secret doors and across haunted bridges, as she runs from those who hunt her and searches for the reason her family was murdered, Richard meets Rat-Speakers, murderers, fancy soul-sucking women, Black Friars, fallen angels, sewer-dwellers, and an assortment of other folks who live outside, underneath, beyond the realm of normal.

As the Neverwhere narrative twists and turns, and inverts on itself, I was continually charmed by the quirkiness of the characters, the path of the plot, and the layers of text and subtext that Gaiman weaves throughout. A thoroughly fun and entertaining book…

#19 This is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz

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This is How You Lose Her is a vivid, visceral collection of stories by the author of The Brief and Wonderful Life of Oscar Wao.  Many of the stories in this collection feature Yunior, a character Diaz introduced in Drown and, I’ve read, closely resembles the author himself. With Yunior, Diaz treats the reader like a confidant, divulging secrets and indiscretions, making inside jokes, taking us on a ride through lust and betrayal, a journey of the heart. We experience Yunior’s experiences first-hand, his sexual awakening and misconduct, his attempts to know women and his struggles to let them go, we are the voyeurs as the desires of his heart battle with the desires of his body.

Here’s what Leah Hager Cohen over at the New York Times writes: “In the new book, as previously, Díaz is almost too good for his own good. His prose style is so irresistible, so sheerly entertaining, it risks blinding readers to its larger offerings. Yet he weds form so ideally to content that instead of blinding us, it becomes the very lens through which we can see the joy and suffering of the signature Díaz subject: what it means to belong to a diaspora, to live out the possibilities and ambiguities of perpetual ­insider/outsider status.”

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#18 A Gathering of Shadows by V.E. Schwab

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This is the second in V.E. Schwab’s series about Kell, a youngish magician living in one of 4 Londons, who has the unique ability to travel and carry messages between them all, and Deliliah Bard, kick-ass pick-pocket and uniquely fun heroine.

These books are transporting, plot-driven, and just plain fun to read. Book #3 is already on my bedside table, waiting…

#15 Norwegian by Night by Derek B. Miller

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15814497How reliable is an unreliable narrator? This is the question I asked myself throughout the whole of this page-turner. The premise of Norwegian by Night is an interesting one: Probably senile, recently widowed, Jewish American man moves to Oslo, where he doesn’t know the language or the culture, to live with his granddaughter and her husband. Recently arrived, he witnesses a violent crime and rescues a young boy at the scene; they escape, evading the police, his granddaughter, and those looking for the boy. Do we trust this narrator, and to what end?

While Norwegian by Night is, at its core, a book of suspense, it also provides a fascinating look at Jewish identity, the frailty of memory, language and the ability to communicate without words, war and the effects of violence on the brain, parenting, aging, and death. It’s great. Read it.

#14 Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk by Kathleen Rooney

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29939353It’s New Year’s Eve, 1984, and ex advertising  maverick Lillian Boxfish, now 84, goes for a walk around Manhattan. She makes stops at meaningful haunts from her life, restaurants, bars, buildings, parks, revisiting her life’s big moments, weighing the cause/effect of old choices, remembering love and relationships long over but not forgotten. On Lillian Boxfish’s journey, we journey with her, into her present via memories of her past.

The book is very readable. Rooney peppers the narrative with nice bits of writing, some good character development, and an intriguing portrait of then/now New York. I just didn’t love character of Lillian Boxfish; the older version I liked okay, but I found the younger version of the character pretty obnoxious and unlikable, and didn’t buy her advertising genius. A fine read, but didn’t love it.

 

#13 Mothering Sunday by Graham Swift

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31147620Though the premise of this book hinges on a romantic liaison, to call this book “a romance” is misleading. There is no bodice-ripping, no Fabio, no throbbing love muscle. I almost didn’t pick it up because of that label.

Think of “romance” in the best sense, it can be sexy, confusing, satisfying, transformative. A young maid on an estate and a young heir of a neighboring manor engage in a tryst that, in one afternoon, realigns the trajectory of their lives. Her life after this one Sunday is changed forever, setting her on a course of self discovery and exploration. She is awakened to the prospect of a different life, she is changed.

I won’t spoil here what leads to this realignment, for that would reveal the heart of the plot. I will say that the more I read, the more I enjoyed the book. I relished the elegance of the prose, and the hazy briefness, so full of longing and sadness, of their romantic encounter. A lovely read.