More about this when I find my voice. Promise.
Month: June 2008
Tomato Girl
Pupek, Jayne. Tomato Girl. Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 2008.
What a beautifully written, tragic first book! The characters are so true to life and so compelling I was picturing them in a movie. It’s told in first person from the point of view of 11 year old Ellie. With the help of a series of seamless recollections Ellie recounts her life with a mentally ill mother and a cheating father. Ellie’s father is taken with, and soon overcome by, a teenage girl who delivers tomatoes to the store he manages. From the moment the “tomato girl” comes into Ellie’s life every day is stacked with another unbelievable tragedy, a level of sadness leading to horror much deeper than the one before. It is hard to imagine the amount of pain this child has to endure at such a tender age. Pupek writes with sentences full of foreshadowing. They hang heavy like dark clouds, bloated with the storm that will erupt any minute.
My only complaint is absence of addressing molestation. Ellie is “grabbed” by boy hard enough to leave a bruise. At the same time her period has started (her first). When Sherrif Rhodes discovers the blood, and Ellie tells him of the rough boy, the Sheriff doesn’t take Ellie to a hospital to be examined by a real doctor. She is brought to a black woman who practices witchcraft. Because the story is set in the late 60’s and racism is hinted at I was surprised Sherriff Rhodes would bring a child to her rather than the local hospital. This is the only part I wish was explained better.
ps~ there are a ton of those “gotcha” sentences that I love so much. Too many to mention.
Things We Hide
Kisa’s in the bathroom murdering ladybugs without remorse; sucking them down with a vacuum. I think there are two survivors but I can’t be sure. They’re in hiding. Indy’s under the bed, watchful eyes in the dark waiting for the killing spree to be over. She hates the vacuum. She’s hiding, too. I’m learning to be a lady, which means keeping things like band aids, bra straps and blemishes…oh, and bad dreams…out of sight. Best foot forward or fall flat on your face.
What other things can we hide? I’m killing a friendship because I can’t deal with the consequences. Not my problem~all my fault. Walk away slowly and no one will get hurt. Or something like that. I spent a long time talking to a friend about it. Weird to talk to one friend about another friend and realize there’s only one friend in the picture – the person you are talking to. It bites to be so blase about the whole thing. What was once care is now so callous. Lies do not make loyalty.
All I have ever wanted is out and out honesty. Step up. Be an adult and tell the fukcing truth. Don’t make yourself or your life out to be something that it isn’t. Stand tall, be proud and show the world who you really are. We love you as you are.
Yet. And, yet. We hide. Hide behind bragging and bravado.
I stand in the mirror’s way and wonder what it really sees in me. If my bra strap slips off my shoulder would you sue me? If stress gets the better of my face would you avoid looking me in the eye? My bad dreams circle like black smoke I can’t blow away. I won’t hide. For better or worse I’m here. Be here, too. Please. I love you the way you are.
So, I’m in the bathroom. A ladybug comes out of hiding. My bra strap falls. I’m almost about to pull it back up and think again. Coming out of hiding I smile and leave it where it is. Fukc it.
An Academic Question
Pym, Barbara. An Academic Question. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1986.
When this book landed on my desk I nearly laughed. It’s only 182 pages long with a decidedly easy-to-read large font. Needless to say I read it in a day!
Here are some things that intrigued me about the book before I read it: Barbara Pym died of breast cancer when she was only 66 years old. Her last book, An Academic Question was published six years after her passing and is actually a blend of two different manuscripts.
Here’s what I put on LibraryThing: An Academic Question at first read appears to be about a lonely, bored, mother of one, who is feels neglected her professor husband. Her friends are bland, her hobbies even moreso. It’s only after she agrees to help her husband find information to support an article he is drafting do things really start to get interesting. As with any academic, there is competition to get published and for Caro’s husband the pressure is on. Human emotion is played out in subtle detail as Caro deals with jealousy, betrayal, and the need for approval from everyone around her.
One of my favorite scenes is when Caro is in the audience, listening to a young professor give a lecture. Bored with the beautiful lecturer’s topic, Caro starts to focus in on how the striking woman is dressed. Upon noticing a pale pink rose pinned between her breasts Caro decides the color matches the roses she has in her own garden. Soon she is imagining her own husband placing the rose…and speculation and imagination create jealousy which becomes an accusation later on…It truly is a classic way jealousy manifests itself.
BookLust Twist: From Book Lust in the chapter, “Barbara Pym: Too Good To Miss” (p 196).
92 in the Shade
McGuane, Thomas. Ninety-Two in the Shade. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1972.
June is fishing month. Go figure. Ninety-Two in the Shade is about a man (Thomas Skelton) who has always wanted to run a guided fishing tour off the Florida Keys. Not the fishing I had pictured for the month of June, but a form of it, I guess. Thomas is new to the business and even newer to competition. He is not without his share of problems. The opening “scene” is Thomas waking up in a hotel and finding four people standing naked in a tub. Right away you know this isn’t your typical River Runs Through It fishing story! Other quirks: violence that does (or doesn’t) happen, relationships that are (or aren’t) good, and the entire book is absent of chapters. I may have come across other books like this but never noticed this chapterlessness before. The only reason why this seems odd is because not having chapters makes it difficult to know where to stop!
I did a little extra research and found out that Ninety-Two in the Shade was made into a movie not long after it was written and while it’s Thomas McGuane’s third work of fiction many critics consider it his best.
I never did get used to McGuane’s “gritty” style of writing, but here are some quotes (and scenes) that caught me: “He walked to Homestead, then right on through town, tripping his brains out in the emptiness of 5 a.m.” (p 4).
A conversation between Skelton and “his girl.” May it confuse you as much as it did me:
Miranda~ “Tom, I had this incredible orgasm.”
Tom~ “Do I have to hear about your organism too?”
M ~ “Just this one. It was like a whole dream of sweet things to eat…Spun sugar, meringue, whipped egg whites…”
T ~ “How about when your chum shot off? Was it a blintz or an omelet?”
M~ “Ask him.”
To say that Ninety-Two in the Shade isn’t without humor would be a lie: “You should never kill somebody if it isn’t funny” ( 34).
BookLust Twist: In both Book Lust and More Book Lust. Book Lust: in the chapter “Montana: In Big Sky Country” (p 156) because Thomas McGuane is from Montana. This, by the way, takes care of a November read because that’s when Montana became a state and Ninety-Two in the Shade was on the November list. More Book Lust: in the chapter “Gone Fishin'” (p 101).
Pass the Party Perfect
My aunt is Mother of the Bride for the first time. As I talked to her I could hear her nerves rattling along the wire. Nerves were bordering on wired nervous. A little over two weeks to go before her little girl becomes Mrs. Someone Else. She wants everything to be perfect. I tell her it’s not going to be. I’m not being mean, just meaningful. My mother wrote a list of everything that went “wrong” at my sister’s wedding. Live and learn I thought. When my day came two years later I tried to remedy all previously made “mistakes.” While I didn’t make my sister’s faux pas, I created my own. It was inevitable. My dress didn’t fit properly. The food line was too long. Father-in-law had the first dance…with his son-in-law. Someone stole a golf cart and a groomsman ended up sleeping the night off in a ditch. Yup. Classy. But the real question is did we have a blast? Yup.
No one has the perfect party. There will always be something wrong with something or somebody. Even if you don’t notice, someone else will. Kisa and I wanted to use stolen champagne flutes for our end-of-night toast. We opted for my great-grandmother’s glasses. Unbeknown to either of us one glass disappeared forever. That has become my deepest regret even though I didn’t know it at the time. So, pass the party perfect. It aint gonna happen. What it will be is a great time!
Things They Carried
O’Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried. New York: Broadway Books, 1998.
I admit it. I have picked this book up three different times now. Technically, I should have read it in March to celebrate the day U.S. troops pulled out of Vietnam (March 1975), but as you can tell, there were plenty of other things to reach for in March…
Nope, I cracked this book open for no other reason than sheer boredom. I finished Peter Pan and The Ground Beneath Her Feet and decided I wasn’t up for The Joy Luck Club…at least not right now. The Things They Carried has been hanging around my office for months now. It just seemed to say “read me” and the time was right. I am so very glad.
This was an amazingly moving book. I had a hard time getting into it the first two times I picked it up, but the third time was a charm because after that I couldn’t put it down. Tim O’Brien writes with such ferocious honesty. He calls it a fiction but it easily could have been the truth. The shocking violence, the depths of sadness, the urgency to survive, the humble efforts to maintain sanity and the humor that survives it all…each chapter is a short story of all of these things. Each story stands alone, complete as it is, yet connects beautifully to the story before it as well as the one after it. Peter S. Prescott from Newsweek said the stories “bounce off each other…” and I would agree.
I could quote nearly each story, but here are my favorites:
“They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terible power of the things they carried” (p 7). The reason why this quote stuck with me is because O’Brien spends the opening chapter listing everything a soldier carried in the Vietnam war. Both the physical and mental, the essential and the sentimental. This quote sums up how they never forgot why they were carrying everything else.
“The problem, though, was that a draft board did not let you choose your war” (p 44). I found this to be one of the most humanitarian statements of the book. O’Brien had just finished explaining that some wars were justified, like stopping Hitler, but in this case he was drafted to fight a war he didn’t understand.
BookLust Twist: From Book Lust in the chapter “Vietnam” (p 239).
ps~ one of the reasons for starting the Book Lust challenge was to find writers I could fall in love with. I wanted one book that would spark an obsession. Much like Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale or Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal Dreams or Katherine Weber’s Objects in the Mirror are Closer than They Appear. All of these books created a rabid need to read anything else written by the authors. I found such an obsession with The Things they Carried. I will go on to get my hands on any and everything Tim O’Brien has written before and since.
June is…
June is:
- Fishing Month (92 in the Shade by Thomas Mcguane)
- Barbara Pym’s birth month (An Academic Question)
- National Family Month (Act of the Damned by Antonio Lobo Antunes)
- The most common month to get married in (Amateur Marriage by Anne Tyler)
If there is time I’ll also reread Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
June is also another LibraryThing Early Review:
- Tomato Girl by Jayne Pupek
Personally, I ended May on a crappy note so June is ME month. It’s also vacation month! Hello Vegas! Hello San Diego! I’m hoping to see some very special people. June is also house-hunting month (like we haven’t been doing that already!). The farm starts up this month and I started a new blog about the fantastic four which I am really, really excited about, too! Like I said, ME month! 8)
~*LunaSea*~ 