Tag: Fiction

One Step Behind

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Mankell, Henning. One Step Behind. Translated by Ebba Segerberg. Havrill Press, 1997.

Reason read: at one time I researched the best time to be a tourist in various countries. I later decided that wasn’t a good enough reason to read a book so I deleted all of the “best time to visit” lists. I guess I missed Sweden. According to something I read a million years ago, July is the best month to visit. Who knows if that is still true. New Reason read: the Bayside Festival is being held this July in Helsingborg.

As a Swedish police officer, Kurt Wallander is an interesting character. One of my favorite elements of Mankell’s writing is how real his characters are drawn. Kurt lost his father and takes the time to help his stepmother sell the house. He has bad dreams and concerning health issues. He doesn’t always listen to his colleagues. He doesn’t have the greatest attention to detail (odd for a police officer). Despite his personal problems he has a dogged dedication to his job. When a group of young people are found murdered he realizes he downplayed the urgency back when they were reported missing months earlier. He assumed they were happy-go-lucky youths and the only crime was their refusal to check in with mom and dad. Then more bodies are found, including that of a fellow police officer with ties to the first victims. Suddenly, Wallander and his team have a serial killer in their midst. Can he solve the crime before more people are slain?

Author fact: Henning Mankell’s photograph looks like how I would picture Kurt Wallander.

Book trivia: confessional – I listened to this on audio and it was hard to differentiate the various characters with their foreign names.

Setlist: the Overture to Rigoletto by Guiseppe Verdi.

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust in the chapter called “I Love a Mystery” (p 117).

Scandalous Risks

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Howatch, Susan. Scandalous Risks. Alfred A. Knopf, 1990.

Reason read: to continue the series started in April in honor of Easter. Since Howatch’s entire series is about the Church of England I thought this would be appropriate.

When we catch up to the residents of Starbridge it is the 1960s are we are introduced to our first main character outside of the Church of England. Venetia Flaxon’s story is told in first person and she is not a religious arch anything. Not a bishop or dean or deacon. She was just a child and a minor character in Ultimate Prizes. Now she takes the lead as a young amorous adult in Scandalous Risks. Her first scandalous risk is to fall in love with 61 year old Neville “Stephen” Aysgarth. Desperate to stay connected to her crush, Venetia takes a job transcribing the notes of Bishop Charles Ashworth as he writes a book disputing the philosophies of Honest to God by John Arthur Thomas Robinson. [A book that is still in print to this day.] This is the center conflict in Scandalous Risks. Bishop Ashworth wants to destroy the teachings of Robinson. Who better to transcribe the Bishop’s scribblings than Venetia who was raised by an agnostic father? Her own motives are no so innocent. To learn more about her dean she uses someone she despises to get close to people in his past, like Jonathan Darrow, his once spiritual advisor. Meanwhile Aysgarth is still practicing his multi-personality tricks in order to not commit adultery by being Neville with Venetia and Stephen with his wife. Stephen is acutely aware of his wife’s well-being while Neville is free to be in love with Venetia. To complicate matters, there are four Nevilles to chose from! [As an aside, in case you were wondering, Venetia’s second scandalous risk was to wear trousers on a Sunday!]
The next generation of characters are introduced: Nick, Jonathan Darrow’s son, is a psychic like his father.
With every Starbridge book, each chapter is headed by a quote from someone connected to the Church of England. This time John Arthur Thomas Robinson, the author of Honest To God.

Quote I loved, “Having reflected that my triumph would have been far more gratifying if Eddie had not been psychically repulsive and mentally exhausting” (p 93). I definitely know people like that. And here is another, “Dimply it occurred to me that in order to participate intelligently in these extraordinary conversations I needed a wisdom which I had not lived long enough to acquire” (p 203).

Author fact: Susan Howatch has been compared to Anthony Trollope.

Book trivia: I probably should have mentioned this with the first book, Glittering Images, but I didn’t think of it. Every book in the Starbridge series can be read independently of the others. Howatch recommends reading them all in order because the histories of each character brings a richness to the plot.

Music: the Beatles’s “Love Me Do”, Beethoven, Swan Lake, Elvis Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel,” “I Need You Love Tonight,” and “You’re Right, I’m Left, She’s Gone”, “Moonlight Sonata”, Aida, “Ode to Joy,” Cliff Richard, Adam Faith, Eden Kane, Floyd Cramer, Del Shannon, Jim Reeves, Buddy Holly’s “Peggy Sue” and “That’ll Be the Day”, the Beatles’ “All You Need is Love,” and “Got a Lot O Living to Do.”

BookLust Twist: from More Book Lust in the chapter called “Fathers, Mothers, Sisters, Brothers: The Family of the Clergy” (p 86).

Dust and Ashes

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Rybakov, Anatoli. Dust and Ashes. Translated by Antonia W. Bouis. Little Brown and Co., 1996.

Reason read: to continue the series started in May.

Like Rybakov’s last novel, Fear, in Dust and Ashes the author takes the time to catch his readers up to the saga thus far. Yuri is a member of the secret police, Vika is married and living in Paris, her brother Vadim is also an NKVD informant. Maxim is in the Red Army as a commander. Nina is a Communist while her sister, Varya, rejects Communism and remains true to her friends. Sasha has been freed from exile but he is not allowed back in Moscow or any other major Russian city. Dust and Ashes begins in 1937. When we left Sasha and Varya, their romance had cooled after Sasha learned of Varya’s previous marriage to a gambler. Sasha struggles to make ends meet in various small towns, first as a truck driver and then as a ballroom dance instructor. World War II is almost a central character alongside Sasha Pankratov and Joseph Stalin. This is the era of endless interrogations (when you would rather have chat). Promotions could mean a reshuffling of the personnel deck or a literal death sentence. It is stunning the way Rybakov can seamlessly interject facts into a fictional account of the Great Purge. Details like the assassination of Trotsky. Two battles rage in Dust and Ashes – the delicate dance of Tyrants (Hitler and Stalin) and the Battle for Romance (Sasha and Varya). Who will win? Sometimes, when the target is not persuaded, the only motivation can come from fear. Confessional: the final pages of Dust and Ashes had me holding my breath. I did not want to believe it was the end. Surely there would be another sequel, a fourth or even fifth installment to the saga. But in actuality, really what more about be said?

Something I wanted to say in the last review but forgot – Rybakov had a character drink pickle juice to combat a hangover. I have to wonder if that really works.

Quotes to quote, “…I want to remain a decent person in these vile times” (p 79). The same could be said for these terrible times. Here is another: “Gone was the joyful amazement at life, the anticipation of happiness in a world which has seemed so inviting and lovely” (p 214).

Author fact: Anatoli Rybakov’s life mirrored Sasha Pankratov’s. Rybakov lived at 51 Arbat Street and he also joined the army.

Book trivia: Antonia W. Bouis also translated Fear.

Music: Confessional: these are songs from Fear: “Rio Rita” and “Splashes of Champagne”.
Dust and Ashes music: Isabella Yurieva, Leshchenko, Ivan Kozlovsky, Maria Maksakova, Stas Mikhallov, “Droplets if Champagne”, “Weary Sun”, and Leonid Utesov’s “From the Odessa Jail”,
Banned songs: “Jail,” “the Hop,” and “Murka.”

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust in the chapter “Russian Heavies” (p 210). Pearl wasn’t kidding. Dust and Ashes was almost too heavy for my heart to lift.

Accordionist’s Son

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Atxaga, Bernardo. The Accordionist’s Son. Translated by Margaret Jull Costa. Graywolf Press, 2003.

Reason read: the running of the bulls in Spain usually takes place in July. This year it was July 7-14.

David Imaz is caught between two worlds. Exiled on his uncle’s ranch in California he looks back on his youth in Basque Spain during the civil war. Young David was caught between his father and uncle. David tried to stay neutral during the varying conflicts, both personal and political. The message of youth received loud and clear was the idea that people lived double lives in order to survive. His father, on the side of the fascists, was suspected of murder and deep down David thought it was true. By playing the accordion like his father, David remained under his thumb. The only escape was to denounce the instrument and join a band of revolutionaries. However, the accordion became crucial as a way to calm the nerves and carry the explosives.
Thoughts:
This was a time of war when anything was possible. Propaganda was spread by donkeys so that the agitators could remain anonymous. Boys turned to boxing because being a human punching bag earned ten times more than an honest day at the saw mill.
As an aside, there is a beautiful moment in the book when an aging David, many years later, sees his family and friends in the colorful wings of butterflies.

Images of life that I liked: the thrill of David’s courtship of Virginia brought me back to my own days of innocence – flirtful letters dropped in a library book drop and the desk of a hotel concierge. The aging of the dog was a message of time passing which David received loud and clear.

This quote makes me think of my friend: “…without curiosity one learns nothing” (p 244).
Another quote I liked, “…time doesn’t pass in vain, that we will not embrace in the grave those whom we failed to embrace in life” (p 265). Amen to that. I’m looking at you, Mr. Nash.

Author fact: While Atxaga wrote a bunch of other books, this is the only one I am reading for the Challenge.

Music: “Mary Queen of Arkansas”, “Barcola”, “Padam, Padam”, Marie Laforet’s “La plage, la vie s’en va”, “To You, My Love” by the Hollies, Credence Clearwater Revival’s “Susie Q”, “Casatschok,” “Pagotxueta,” Henry Mancini’s “Soldiers in the Rain,” “The Touch of Your Lips,” Antonio Machin’s “Angelitos Negros,” and “Five Hundred Miles.”

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the simple chapter called “Spain” (p 218).

Which Witch?

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Ibbotson, Eva. Which Witch. Apple Paperback, 1979.

Reason read: I am not really sure what I meant by this. I put Which Witch in the category of “Tequila Month” (???).

Imagine being new parents and realizing your darling baby boy is not normal. He was actually born a wizard. George became Arriman Canker and he grew up a solitary dark magic maker. When it came time for Arriman to finally find a wife he decided to hold a contest the week of Halloween. Which witch would make the perfect mate? Only a competition could tell him the true dark witch for him. He wanted a witch who could create the most vile, the darkest, the most powerful and evil magic imaginable. Meet the witches vying for Arriman’s hand in marriage:
Mabel Wrack, the sea witch. Her familiar is an octopus. Her magic for the competition was to raise the Kraken and my favorite magic of the whole lot.
Ethel Feedbag, the country witch with the pig as her familiar.
Nancy and Nora Shouter, twin witches with chickens. Their magic
Mother Bloodwort who occasionally turns herself into inanimate objects and then cannot remember how to change herself back.
Madame Olympia, with an aardvark as a familiar. Her magic for the competition was the most impressive. She created a Symphony of Death Performed by a Cast of Thousands.
Belladonna, a young witch with no familiar.
Needless to say, the competition does not go as planned but Arriman finds a wife and they all live happily ever after…sort of.

Here is something new I learned about magic: milk is the antidote to a spell.

Monalot (her real name was Gwendolyn Swamp). Her familiar is a sheep. She couldn’t compete because she got sick.

Author fact: Ibottson has written a ton of stuff for children. This is the only book I am reading for the Challenge.

Book trivia: My copy of Which Witch was illustrated by Annabel Large.

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust in the chapter called “Not Only for Kids: Fantasies for Grown-Ups” (p 175). It should be of note that Which Witch is the last book in this chapter.

Not Quite Dead Enough

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Stout, Rex. Not Quite Dead Enough. Pyramid Books, 1944.

Reason read: to continue the series started in November.

Rex Stout likes to throw his readers a curve ball now and again. When we rejoin Archie and Nero in Not Quite Dead Enough, Archie has been in military service in Washington D.C. for two months. There is a war going on and he is trying to do his part. Meanwhile back in Manhattan, Nero Wolfe wants to do his part for the war effort as well. Comically, he and Fritz have been training to be soldiers by exercising and eating better (ha!). When Archive returns he is horrified by the change.
A welcome surprise for readers is the fact that Lily Rowan is back. We first met Archie’s crush back in Some Buried Caesar. This time Archie has set his sights on a new girl, Ann Armory, who works for the National Bird League. Only…she ends up dead. Of course she does. Since Wolfe is not interested in solving crime anymore Archie has to make matters into his own hands by becoming suspect number one. He is last seen with the pretty girl at a dance. His hair is found in her dead fist. Will Archie convince Nero to take the case and clear his name?

Book trivia: this is another one of those “double mysteries” where two novellas are combined.

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust in the chapter called “Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe: Too Good To Miss” (p 226).

Vows

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Spencer, LaVyrle. Vows. Jove, 1988.

Reason read: Spencer’s birthday is in July. Read in her honor.

We begin Vows just outside the territory of Wyoming in the year 1888. Vows is a sweet story peppered with the perfect amount of old west/new territory drama. Victorian decorum mixes with modern day sensibilities about love and intimacy. Emily Walcott, a feisty tomboy and fiercely loyal to her family is engaged to a family friend she has known since childhood. Charles Bliss followed her family from back east to Wyoming so not only is he a family friend, he is the epitome of home. However, the sparks don’t fly when she is kissing Charles Bliss on the wild western plain (thanks, Natalie, for that phrase). Still she knows he is a good man and her family has loved him forever. Enter Thomas Jeffcoat, a stranger in town. Newly arrived, he is the antithesis of Charles. Rough around the edges, a threat to her family’s business, and not afraid to speak his mind. Tom Jeffcoat knows how to make sparks catch fire when it comes to Emily Walcott. And there are sparks from the very beginning of their acquaintance. Who will Emily chose for her beau? Safe and familiar Charles or wild and unpredictable Tom?
As an aside, even though Spencer bucked the stereotypical bodice ripper cover, she kept the cliché of one character vehemently hating another while the attraction silently simmered. Love/hate relationships are the perfect vehicle for smoldering passions.

Line I liked, “How difficult it was to unravel a lifetime’s snarls” (p 284).

Author fact: Spencer thanked her local librarians for helping research details in Vows. I just love that.

Book trivia: Vows is simile central. Be prepared for “like a mole,” “like a white flotilla,” “like a giant,” “like a railroad tunnel,” “like an unspring wagons”, and on and on.

Music: Strauss Blue Danube, “While Strolling Through the Park One Day”, “All Praise, All Glory, Now We Sing”, “The Blue-tailed Fly”

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust in the obvious chapter called “Romance Novels: Our Love is Here to Stay” (p 203).

Ultimate Prizes

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Howatch, Susan. Ultimate Prizes. Alfred A Knopf, 1989.

Reason read: to continue the series started in April in honor of Easter.

Susan Howatch has struck gold with a literary formula that works: someone has a spiritual crisis and a member of the Church of England comes to the rescue with intense conversations and guidance. Most of the time, these crises involve sexual hang-ups and rocky marital relations usually brought on by long suffering family traumas. In Glittering Images Charles Asgood sought the spiritual consultation of Jonathan Darrow. In Glamorous Powers Jonathan Darrow conducts intense interviews with his superior. In Ultimate Prizes is it Neville Aysgarth’s turn to take young and beautiful Dido Tallent under his wing as she seeks a religious education. After Tallent destroys Neville’s psyche, he in turn needs rescue and finds it in Jonathan Darrow and Aidan Lucas.
The “ultimate prize” meant having the perfect spouse, the perfect family, the perfect career.
Neville Aysgarth is a mere forty-one years old; really too young to be an archdeacon. His spiritual philosophy and religious career was based on Charles Earle Raven, a Dean of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. Raven had a unique perspective, believing that science and theology belonged together. Aysgarth’s game changes when he becomes a widower. His ultimate prize because an obsession. He loved the chase but not the win. It was this pursuit that ultimately demolished friendships, both political and personal.
As an aside, it is interesting to see another character’s take on a previous character. Jonathan Darrow is disliked by Neville, but it is Darrow who introduces him to Aidan Lucas when Neville needed spiritual guidance. Additionally, Howatch cleverly reveals secrets about characters from previous stories so that more than once readers have that ah-ha moment. The title of the next book in the series usually pops up by the end of the book.

Quote I liked, “A hangover combined with horror, guilt, and self-loathing is hell on earth” (p 136). Confessional: I couldn’t help but think of the Dave Matthews Band when I read the line, “Eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die” (p 44).
Second confessional: Even though I knew “ringing down the curtain” meant repentance, I grew weary of how many times Neville Aysgarth made reference to his curtains – going up or coming down.

Author fact: In 2012, Howatch was awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from Hope College.

Book trivia: Ultimate Prizes continues the theme of intense spiritual guidance. Like Glittering Images and Glamorous Powers, Ultimate Prizes contains deep spiritual conversations.

Music: “Lili Marlene”

BookLust Twist: from More Book Lust in the chapter called “Fathers, Mothers, Sisters, Brothers: the Family of the Clergy” (p 86).

Fear

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Rybakov, Anatoli. Fear. Translated by Antonina W. Bouis. Little, Brown & Company, 1992.

Reason read: to continue the series started in May.

This is the continuation of the story of the first generation to grow up under the Soviet regime. One of the things I appreciated about Fear was that Rybakov took the time to recap The Children of Arbat before launching into the story of Fear. It was nice to have a refresher on all the different characters and where we last left them: Lead character Sasha Pankratov has been exiled to Siberia for making a flippant joke in 1934 in the school newspaper. Lesser characters like Yuri went to work for the secret police and had blackmailed Vika into becoming an informant. Maxim Kostin was in the army and in love with a teacher, Nina. Lena Budyagina, daughter of a Soviet diplomat and Yuri’s on again, off again lover, had an illegal abortion and almost died. Nina and Varya are on opposite sides of the Soviet loyalty.
Fear takes place between 1935 – 1937. Again, Stalin is a prominent character in the book. Rybakov does a good job humanizing the dictator (Stalin liked flowers), and express his growing paranoia and erratic behavior: on good days Stalin would remind subordinates of orders he never gave in the first place. On bad days, he would find trivial ways to execute long-loyal subordinates. It was troublesome when to talk of Stalin’s wife’s suicide was considered counterrevolutionary slander. Stalin was out for revenge against even people who did not betray him. Good citizens scrambled to distance themselves from lifelong friends; individuals “confessed” to be criminals. The political landscape is as such that a tenth grader could be expelled for saying the wrong name on an oral report.
Embedded in the story is the spiderweb-thin thread of hope is Sasha and Varya’s love. Is it strong enough to endure insecurity, assumptions, self-doubt, and Stalin?

Confessional: I gave myself nightmares thinking too hard about how Soviet rule investigated “terrorism” cases: investigation time was shortened to ten days; there was less time to defend oneself (only 24 hours); no lawyers could be present at a trial; appeals were not allowed; sentencing began immediately. So…if you were wrongly accused of being a terrorist…I ask myself what is the point of the formality of a trial? People are just going to be found guilty of something and when you are guilty you are as good as dead.

As an aside, I very much appreciated that Rybakov took the time to recap, Children of the Arbat, the first installment of his trilogy. Now I would like a dictionary of Russian names. They are all very confusing to my untrained ear.

Author fact: Rybakov also wrote Dust and Ashes, the final book in the series.

Book trivia: Fear is the second book in the Arbat series.

Music: Bach, Mozart, Tchaikovsky, “I Remember When I Was Still Young Then”, Vadim Kozin, Alexander Vertinsky, Nadezhda Plevitskaya.

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust in the chapter called “Russian Heavies” (p 210)

Galatea 2.2

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Powers, Richard. Galatea 2.2 Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1995.

If you know the story of Pygmalion than you will recognize Galatea 2.2 as its clever reinterpretation.
Interestingly enough, Galatea 2.2‘s fictional protagonist is named Richard Powers and is a writer, using the names of books he has written like Gold Bug and Prisoner’s Dilemma. Richard is also a Humanist-in-Residence at an unnamed research facility. His failed relationship with a former student is woven in with his present day life and colors his thinking on the daily. During a year-long residency, he and a colleague embark on building a thinking machine. With his long term relationship in shambles and writer’s block stalking him daily, training a neural network seems like the perfect diversion. As an aside, why anyone would want to create a computer that can pass a comprehensive exam in English literature is beyond me. The whole story reminded me of the movie Short Circuit when #5 learned to think for himself. There is always a vector involved somewhere.

Quote I liked, “And chaos chose that moment to hit home” (p 3). I love the imagery. Can you just see chaos as a cat, perched on high, waiting for the perfect moment to attack?
As an aside, could Powers be talking about someone else when he wrote the line, “He looked as though he took tanning cream orally” (p 16)? <Insert thinking emoji here.>
Here’s another quote I loved, “No one knows how full my hands were, or care” (p 171).

Author fact: I am reading a total of nine books by Powers. Two of them he mentions in Galatea 2.2: Prisoner’s Dilemma and Gold Bug Variations.

Playlist: “You’re the Top”, Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto, “Three Blind Mice”, The Mormon Tabernacle Choir Sings John Philip Sousa, Traverner’s Western Wynde Mass, “Amazing Grace”, Diana Ross, Purcel’s “Evening Hymn”, Alfonso Ferrabosco, and “Old Black Joe”.

Writing in book on pages 4, 11, 30, 31, 63, 79, 171, 188, 270, 279.

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust in the chapter called “Mechanical Men, Robots, Automatons, and Deep Blue” (p 150) and again in the chapter called “Richard Powers: Too Good To Miss” (p 191).

Civil to Strangers

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Pym, Barbara. Civil to Strangers: and Other Writings. Edited by Hazel Holt. E.P. Dutton, 1987.

Reason read: Pym was born in the month of June. Read in her honor.

We owe the publication of Civil to Strangers to the loving family and friends of Barbara Pym. As literary executor Pym’s sister made sure Pym’s words lived on. It is a good thing because Pym was a master at showcasing the true sense of small community. The silent dislikes and quiet jealousies; a society full of disappointed and disappointing people. No one wants to be taken for granted and yet they are, repeatedly. These are the stories of a microcosm of flawed people. In the main story, Civil to Strangers, Cassandra March-Gibbon wants her husband of five years to pay more attention to her. As a writer, Adam is terribly preoccupied. Cassandra thinks by pretending to have feelings a new stranger from Budapest she will force Adam to be more demonstrative of his love for her. The plan backfires when Adam encourages the relationship with Stefan Tilos. The situation goes from bad to worse when Tilos develops feelings for Cassandra (as one is apt to do when someone is lavishing unprovoked attention on them). Tilos in turn needs to make Cassandra jealous when she does not show any sign of wanting to commit to a relationship. Cassandra is not making Adam jealous. Tilos is not winning over the girl. Nobody is getting exactly what they want. By taking separate holidays, Adam and Cassandra allow themselves to take stock of their marital situation.

Other writings in Civil to Strangers include:

Gervase and Flora
“Home Front Novel”
So Very Sweet
“So, Some Tempestuous Morn”
“The Christmas Visit”
“Goodbye Balkan Captain”
Across a Crowded Room
“Finding a Voice” – a radio transcript.

Quotes to quote, “…but now, since her marriage, she had felt less tempted to break out” (p 17).

Author fact: Pym was twenty-three when she wrote Civil to Strangers. It was her second novel.

Book trivia: Civil to Strangers was unpublished at the time of Pym’s death. It and several other writings were publishing posthumously. The working title was Adam and Cassandra. Seems simple enough.

Music: Haydn’s Creation. That’s it.

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust in the chapter called “Pym’s Cup Runneth Over” (p 195).

The Temple

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Spender, Stephen. The Temple. Harper and Row Publishers, 1987.

Reason read: June is Pride month. Read in honor of love, no matter how you find it.

To know that The Temple is a semi-autobiographical fiction gives weight to Spender’s words. Most everything that happens to the main character, poet Paul Schoner, in The Temple is something that happened to Spender in and around 1929. He thinly disguises his relationship with other writers (most significantly W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood) as he travels to Hamburg from Oxford. It is important to remember that in the 1920s censorship was prevalent in England. As a homosexual, Spender needed to live his life in lies. His true identity was hidden like a secret. Germany in 1929, while more forgiving about lifestyles, was also going through its own dark period. Spender includes the growing sense of foreboding as Hitler comes to power. Though fascists and Nazis Spender paints a picture of a society that foregoes the history of friendship for the sake of power. It’s violent ending is a sign of dark days ahead.

Author fact: Spender was the first non-American to serve as Consultant in Poetry in English to the Library of Congress.

Book trivia: The Temple could be a movie.

Setlist: Cole Porter’s “Let’s Fall in Love”, Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet, Wagner’s Ring cycle, Beethoven, and Schubert.

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the chapter called “Oxford” (p 170). As an aside, I am not sure I would have included this in the Oxford chapter. I would have thought it more appropriate it a chapter on Germany or homosexuality.

Orange Fish

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Shields, Carol. The Orange Fish. The Fourth Estate, 2004.

Reason read: June is short story month.

  • Orange Fish – a couple finds their marriage saved by a lithograph of a fish.
  • Chemistry – a group of people join the YMCA Winter Enrichment Program to learn the recorder.
  • Hazel – after her philandering husband dies of a heart attack, Hazel learns to live again. As an aside, my father was the same age as Brian when he died, at fifty-five.
  • Today is the Day – the planting of the blisterlily.
  • Hinterland – Meg and Roy Sloan of Milwaukie, Missouri travel to France.
  • Block Out – Meershank has writers block so travels to Portugal with his wife, looking for inspiration.
  • Collision – Marta is waiting for Malcolm Brownstone, the Recreation and Resort Consultant, to arrive.
  • Good Manners – Georgia Willow oversees instructing people on Canadian manners.
  • Times of Sickness and Health – Kay is surrounded by people always telling her what to do.
  • Family Secrets – when family secrets are all that you have, you tend to protect them.
  • Fuel for the Fire – a daughter lets her aging and widower father burn anything he can find in her glorious fireplace.
  • Milk Bread Beer Ice – Barbara and Peter Cormin are a sad couple with nothing to say after thirty-plus years of marriage.

Author fact: I found a Carol Shields Literary Trust website here. Really cool site.

Book trivia: Orange Fish is comprised of twelve short stories about friendships and relationships and won the Marian Engel Award in 1990.

Quote to quote, “How was he to know she would mistake a random disruption for lasting attachment?” (p 136).

Confessional: I just lost my Papa-in-law last week. When the protagonist of Orange Fish confessed that he wanted to run a dude ranch, I thought of Papa. He, too, had cowboy fantasies.

Setlist: Mozart, Haydn, Bach, Chopin, Handel, and Vivaldi.

BookLust Twist: from More Book Lust in the chapter called “Carol Shields: Too Good To Miss” (p 197).

After Life

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Ellis, Rhian. After Life. Amazon Encore, 2000.

Reason read: After Life takes place in New York, a city rich in culture. The Puerto Rican Day Parade also takes place in New York in the month of June.

I am the type of person who tries to look at a situation from every angle before making a judgment about it, good or bad. I want to walk around it, peer under it, climb over it and look down from above; I want to make sure I haven’t missed a single detail. So when Naomi Ash says “First I had to get his body into the boat” in the very first line of After Life I did not immediately assume she intentionally murdered her boyfriend, Peter Morton. Nowhere does she say as much on page one. Maybe Peter Morton had an accident, like falling off the roof or a fatal health episode, like a heart attack. And maybe, just maybe, since Naomi Ash lives in such a remote area she needed to illegally dispose of his body. Thinking a little darker – maybe Peter and Naomi fought and things went horribly sideways. Or maybe his death was a suicide, but he made it look like murder because he wanted to frame her. In the first two hundred pages of After Life the reader cannot be sure of anything at all. For two hundred pages Naomi slowly navigates the story of her childhood, her teenage years, how she became a medium, and her current life in the community of Train Line. She carefully parses out the details of everything but Peter Morton’s death. The mystery of what happened to her boyfriend stays tightly under wraps for a good portion of the book.
But the story is worth the wait. In the meantime Ellis writes with an other-worldly aura that keeps the reader entertained. She moves through language with languid grace, like slow moving water. Take for example, the way Ellis describes a voice falling flat in a deep snow-covered landscape. She is correct. If you have ever stood in a winter white landscape you know if the snow is deep enough it has a way of making sound plummet into an eerie depth of alien silence.
The plot of Ellis’s short book is simple. Naomi Ash, following in her mother’s footsteps, is a medium. She lives and practices her craft in a community called Train Line in the fictional town of Wallamee, in upstate New York. She has let readers know that she continues to carry the secret of disposing of the body of her boyfriend, Peter Morton. The secret has laid buried, just like Peter, for a decade. Like all skeletons, in the closet or otherwise, they eventually resurface and when Peter’s bones are discovered, the whole town buzzes with the mystery. Meanwhile, coincidentally, Naomi’s mother’s trade is growing stale and people are tiring of her. Her radio show is about to be canceled. What better way to jump start a failing career than to solve the mystery of the bones?

Confessional: as the hostilities towards Naomi grow I found myself becoming more and more anxious for her. First the child she babysits in the afternoons starts to turn on her, then Officer Peterson takes a curious dislike to her.

As an aside, when I first saw the title I immediately thought of Ricky Gervais and his show of the same name. They are not the same.
As another aside, the harvesting of grapes made me think of my wedding. All of the wine came from the Finger Lakes region of Upstate New York.

Lines I immediately identified with, “My mother’s good moods could be more bewildering than her bad ones” (p 64), and “You could life up one of her lies and find a truth beneath it, and then find beneath that truth another lie, and spend your whole life pulling away layers and never get to the bottom of it” (p 122), and one more, “Mothers and daughters are put on Earth to tear each others hearts out” (p 249). Enough about mothers. Here is another good quote completely unrelated to mothers, “…but opening my mouth on that subject would gain me no friends” (p 96).

Author fact: After Life is Rhian Ellis’s first and only novel.

Book trivia: the version of After Life that I picked up was a Nancy Pearl Presents a Book Lust Rediscovery. She wrote the introduction to this edition. Confession: I had never heard of Book Lust Rediscovery and wonder how many other books are republished as such.

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust in the chapter called “First Lines to Remember” (p 86).

Children of the Arbat

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Rybakov, Anatoli. Children of the Arbat. Little, Brown and Company, 1988.

Reason read: Victory Day in Russia is celebrated on May 9th.

This is 1930s Moscow. The Arbat is the intellectual and artistic community of Moscow and Sasha Pankratov, a member of the Young Communist League, has been arrested for alleged subversion. He has been exiled in Siberia for his political activities and the counterrevolutionary conversations he didn’t even know he was having. Even his uncle who wields considerable political power as could not alter or commute his sentence of three years. (As an aside, Sasha’s mother, Sofya Alexandrovna, broke my heart while she was preparing for Sasha’s exile.)
Intertwined with Sasha’s story are the other residents of the Arbat. These characters are also affected by the current political climate. For example, the chance of Yuris getting job placements could be hindered by the fact he has an older brother in prison. Boys are entering the Red Army to prove themselves to Stalin. The Arbat neighborhood struggles to survive the political games. Children of the Arbat also delves into the psychology of Joseph Stalin’s true-life growing paranoia. As history tells us, his was a sickness that went unchecked and as a result, mushroom into a full-blown psychotic break from reality. You could be severely punished for any criticism of Stalin, however small. Just ask his dentist.

As an aside, I wonder how much truth is embedded in The Children of Arbat. Did Stalin actually say, “To lead is to see ahead”? It was interesting to learn that he wrote poetry under an assumed name.

Phrase I liked, “…memories…too human for prison…” (p 136).

Author fact: Rybakov lived on Arbat Street when he was a child. He was also exiled like Sasha. You could say Children of the Arbat is autobiographical.

Book trivia: Children of the Arbat was suppressed by the Soviet Union for over twenty years. Today, it is considered a classic. It was also made into a sixteen-part television series.

Confessional: Lena reminds me of myself in my early days, say 20s. I’m the one to leave a lover in the early morning hours, just before dawn.

Music: “Mr. Brown”, “Black Eyes”, “Oh Little Lemons”, “Forgotten and Abandoned”, Melkhov, Vertinsky, “Ramona”, Leshchenko, Stravinsky, Diaghilov, Pavlova, Tchaikovsky & Jacob Polonsky

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust in the chapter called “Russian Heavies” (p 210). Interestingly enough, in Book Lust Rybakov’s first name was spelled Anatolii, with a double i at the end. Nowhere in the pages of my copy of Children of the Arbat is it spelled that way.