This isn't one those books about which you would ever say "Oh yeah, I read that." It is a beautifully packaged and presented tome of 1241 pages about This isn't one those books about which you would ever say "Oh yeah, I read that." It is a beautifully packaged and presented tome of 1241 pages about 1368 grape varieties used at some point or another to make wine. There are in fact roughly 10,000 vine varieties, representing some six dozen species. Wine Maven Jancis Robinson and her editorial colleagues restrict themselves to those varieties used in the commercial production (historical or modern) of wine.
At $175 a pop, this is serious wine geek territory.
The book is gorgeous but oh heavens, is that some small font! Arranged alphabetically, Wine Grapes gives a brief description of each variety, its origins and parentage, viticultural characteristics, where it's grown and what its wine tastes like. Brilliant. Totally Brilliant. Length of content varies - the section on PINOT, which has a large number of clonal variations, goes on for pages; Sary Pandas ("Old Ukranian variety planted mainly in the south of the country for dessert wines") merits half a page.
There are sumptuously rendered paintings (copies, natch) of many of the most common varieties and tri-fold family tree style diagrams of important variety pedigrees.
This is about as crazy-beautiful as wine guides get. It's a lifetime of information and a reading labor of love for those who are enchanted by wine.
And indulge me for a moment in a rant. VARIETAL is an adjective. VARIETY is a noun. A VARIETAL wine refers to a style of wine, made primarily from a single grape VARIETY. Saint-Émilion Grand cru classé is not a blend of the varietals Merlot, Cabernet franc and Cabernet sauvignon. It is a blend of those VARIETIES.
I see and hear over and over again wine professionals who really should know better using varietal when they mean variety. I see it on winery websites, in wine professionals' blogs, in magazines, store shelf talkers, and hear it used incorrectly almost daily by sales people who bring wine to my office.
Okay, phew. Rant over. Pour yourself of a glass of Inzolia (a nutty Sicilian white) and dive into Wine Grapes. Just don't ask me to pull you out. ...more
On two successive nights this week I woke suddenly, yelling out in fright. In my dreams I was moments away from becoming the victim of a horrific assaOn two successive nights this week I woke suddenly, yelling out in fright. In my dreams I was moments away from becoming the victim of a horrific assault. Shaken, I turned on the light, shifting uncomfortably in sheets soaked in my sweat, and I reached for The Round House. Louise Erdrich’s profound novel haunted my dreams and moved me to tears and laughter in my waking hours.
Geraldine Coutts, an Ojibwe living on a reservation in North Dakota, doesn’t escape from her nightmare. On a gentle spring Sunday in 1988 her thirteen year old son Joe and her husband Bazil, a tribal judge, peel her fingers from the steering wheel of her car and speed her unyielding body to the hospital. The front of her shirt is covered in vomit and she reeks of gasoline. Raped and nearly burned alive, Geraldine escaped when her captor went in search of matches.
Geraldine’s physical wounds heal in time, but the spirit of this proud, vibrant woman is crushed. She tumbles into depression, refusing to leave her bedroom, barely eating, escaping her terror through the false protection of sleep. The Round House opens with this crime and it becomes the incident which ushers Joe, the novel’s narrator, out of the smooth waters of his childhood into the murky depths of maturity.
The Round House is more than a coming-of-age story. The novel has many layers, each beautifully rendered in language that is so pure it belies the complex themes. The search for Geraldine’s attacker propels the narrative and in this, it is a tense literary thriller. It is an exploration of tribal law and the protracted effort by the federal government to chip away at Native American sovereignty. Tribal political and judicial limbo is a chord that resonates throughout Erdich’s works, yet when told through the perspective of a child it becomes the character’s discovery of his legacy and not the political agenda of the author. It is a novel rich with history, mythology and adventure.
But more than these themes, this is a novel of family. The tight union of Bazil, Geraldine and Joe forms the familial core. Erdrich’s portrait of a strong woman collapsing dug so deeply under my skin – this cold reality was the source of my nightmares. But the ways a husband and a son respond to the woman they love as she falls apart, how hard they work to lift her up and save her, are heartfelt and poignant. Erdrich captures each character’s emotions and reactions in vivid and graceful detail.
The theme of family extends through the tribal community. Erdrich reveals daily life on a reservation. She shows us what we think we know: the poverty and alcoholism on the inside, the marginalization and racism from the outside. But she also conveys a sense of community that few of us will ever experience, no matter how idyllic our childhood. Within the tribe everyone belongs to everyone else – the definition of family is not limited to blood relations. The communal responsibility demonstrates a solid foundation built on shared history and beliefs.
Despite the violent crime that churns the plot, there many moments of levity and sweetness in The Round House The novel’s comic foil is Mooshom, Joe’s ancestor and tribal elder. And I do mean elder. He’s entering his second century as salty as a sailor and with libido to spare. The many scenes Joe shares with his besties Cappy, Angus and Zack are ripe with thirteen year old boy hormones, antics and tenderness.
I can’t sing loudly enough my praises for The Round House. I also can’t believe this is the first Louise Erdrich novel I’ve read. It has been a year of celebrated-American author discoveries for me: Terry Tempest Williams, Cormac McCarthy, Louise Erdrich, not to mention the astonishing debut of Amanda Coplin (The Orchardist). That they are each deeply connected to the American West is significant to me as a reader. Through their words I have developed a deeper understanding, love and compassion for my enormous and complex backyard....more
I got a table at the Rainbow Room I told my wife I'd be home soon Big ships are approaching the docks I got my hi-fi boom box Mashed potatoes in cello
I got a table at the Rainbow Room I told my wife I'd be home soon Big ships are approaching the docks I got my hi-fi boom box Mashed potatoes in cellophane I see my life going down the drain Hold me baby and don't let go Pretty girls help to soften the blow
Palm trees; the flat broke disease And LA has got me on my knees I am the bluest of blues Every day a different way to lose
The Go Getter I'll be the Go Getter That's my plan That's who I am The Go Getter Yeah the Go Getter
The Go Getter The Black Keys
I have a complicated relationship with social satire. I give the vulgar and violent (thinking here of South Park and Chuck Palahniuk) a wide berth –– but the bizarre sensibilities of Monty Python, the gentle humor of Garrison Keillor or the politician-skewering tirades of Stewart and Colbert tickle me. I have the hardest time appreciating modern literary satire. When I commit to spending a few days with a book, I want story. Good, old-fashioned, beginning-middle-end story, not cynical commentary wrapped in wit.
Jess Walter’s Beautiful Ruins is the marriage of gentle social satire with old-fashioned story-telling; a marriage that gives life to a delightfully original and brave novel. Like any skilled satirist, Walter creates a world that is slightly off-kilter – not bizarre, not unbelievable- just a sense that something, somehow is slightly amiss. The reader is always a bit wobbly – guaranteeing she will take nothing for granted in the narrative.
The title Beautiful Ruins refers to one of novel’s central themes: the inevitable crumbling of youth, of promise, of dreams. There are so many beautiful ruins in this story, which takes place in 1962 Italy and present-day Hollywood, with a bit of contemporary Spokane and Edinburgh and 1970’s Seattle tossed in, not to forget a slight detour to the Sierra Nevada mountains in the 1850’s.
Among the ruins we find the village of Porto Vergogna and the dreams of its most ambitious resident, hotel owner Pasquale Tursi; the actress Dee Moray, who comes to Porto Vergogna in 1962 to convalesce; Alvis Bender, a war veteran turned writer who can’t write past his first chapter; the legendary movie producer Michael Deane, who has made a beautiful ruin of his face with Botox and plastic surgery; Deane’s assistant Claire Silver, whose love life and career represent everything she hates about sell-out, superficial Los Angeles; former Seattle grunge rocker Pat Bender, a mid-life shamble of addiction and self-loathing; and aspiring screenwriter Shane Wheeler, who delivers one of the book’s most surprising chapters, a pitch for a movie about that great ruin of the American frontier spirit: the doomed Donner party.
That’s a heckuva lot of characters (and there are more, far more!) and this is a heckuva lot of story. Yet it works, in all its madcap and poignant twists, thanks to Walter’s crisp writing and efficient plotting. You fall in love with these characters – Walter gives them such soul, your heart is constantly tugged. This is a book you could read in the space of a Sunday, not because it’s simple, but because you simply don’t want to put it down. I waver and withhold a fifth star because the Hollywood scenes feel a bit thin and fantastical to me - there's that satire twitch of mine - and I couldn't quite connect with Claire, who holds a pivotal role, until she, well, I don't want to spoil things.
If you don’t care for Hollywood endings, you might feel cheated by Walter’s wrap-up of his intertwined story lines. Me? I’m a sucker for spoonful of sugar to make the medicine of satire go down.
Richard Burton makes a brilliantly comic cameo; it is in fact this famous actor for whom the book is titled, after Louis Menard’s piece in The New Yorker: “[Dick] Cavett’s four great interviews with Richard Burton were done in 1980….Burton, fifty-four at the time, and already a beautiful ruin, was mesmerizing.”
Jess Walter uses his characters and their exploits to poke firmly but not cruelly at the bubbles of pop culture, our adoration of celebrity and beauty and the fickle nature of the film and publishing industries. Not to mention the fickle and fleeting nature of love. He shows the folly of great expectations and the beautiful ruins of unfulfilled hopes and dreams. It is a charming literary mosaic.
It is a rare read that cuts through the surface noise of daily life and becomes the one sound you can hear clearly, like a church bell on a still wintIt is a rare read that cuts through the surface noise of daily life and becomes the one sound you can hear clearly, like a church bell on a still winter morning. It commands your full attention and you willingly shut out the world and surrender to the power of its images, characters and the force of its story. Amanda Coplin’s debut novel, The Orchardist, is one such book.
Set in the early years of the 20th century in the golden valleys and granite hills of Chelan county in north-central Washington state, The Orchardist is a fierce and poetic story of the Northwest frontier.
William Talmadge, the orchardist, has led a secluded, solitary life since he was a young man. Orphaned in early adolescence, he and his younger sister Elsbeth, worked on their own to build and maintain acres of apple and apricot orchards in the Wenatchee Valley. When she turns sixteen, Elsbeth vanishes. Whether she is taken or disappears of her own volition is a question that will haunt Talmadge as the century turns and he enters the later years of his life.
Talmadge provides refuge to two young women who appear in his orchard one day, filthy, starving and pregnant. By inviting them into his home, he opens the door to great tragedy and profound love. Talmadge is a nurturer – it is an undeniable facet of his character that he seeks to repair what has been damaged by neglect or abuse, whether it is sapling or a human heart.
But, as Talmadge learns, even the most tender care, the strongest scion of love and compassion, cannot heal all wounds.
Coplin’s prose is exhilarating. She composes with quiet confidence, her narrative rich in period detail. And although she describes ugly circumstances– the suffering of women trapped in desperate conditions, a time when deprivation and disease swept through communities with shocking regularity – she writes with such empathy and beauty that the heart is reminded to hope. And the heart is rewarded. And it is shattered.
Coplin’s writing is uniquely and brilliantly her own, but a few favorite authors came to my mind while reading The Orchardist: Toni Morrison, for her evocative and dark period pieces and haunted women; Ivan Doig for the warmth of his characters and his passion for the West; Kent Haruf for his restraint and gentleness; Tim Winton for his truth-telling about the complicated nature of family.
I always hold my breath when encountering a familiar setting or terrain in a book: will the author have a feel for the place, its light and colors, its scents and temperatures? Will she follow the undulations of its land and the shapes in its cities? Coplin, a native of the Wenatchee Valley, not only conveys the beauty of the sage-steppe of the Cascade mountain foothills, the gold of its valleys, the shimmering glory of its aspen forests and glacial lakes, she erases the damage wrought by the past one hundred years of development. You are taken to a time when the air and water were so pure, the land so unscathed, that you cry in homesickness for a place you never really knew. The names from my home, Wenatchee, Cashmere, Ellensburg, Methow, Walla Walla, Chelan, Okanogan, Stehekin, Dungeness, are renewed and flow through this novel like poetry.
This is one of those novels I want to carry around to show everyone, to bring up in every conversation even tangentially related to reading or the Northwest. I cried when I turned its final page. I wept for the characters, for the past, for the gift of reading sentences so beautifully and thoughtfully constructed. I reckon this will be my top read of 2012. Brava, Amanda. Thank you.
They passed through a highland meadow carpeted with wildflowers, acres of golden groundsel and zinnia and deep purple gentian and wild vines of blue m
They passed through a highland meadow carpeted with wildflowers, acres of golden groundsel and zinnia and deep purple gentian and wild vines of blue morninglory and a vast plain of varied small blooms reaching onward like a gingham print to the farthest serried rimlands blue with haze and the adamantine ranges rising of out nothing like the backs of seabeasts in a Devonian dawn.
I read this and I marvel. How does one writer, equipped with the same words, the same semantic possibilities as any, know to string these particular words together in just this way, paragraph after paragraph, page after page? My copy of Cormac McCarthy's 1985 classic Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West is mauled by dog-eared pages and inked underlines as I seek to capture and remember his revelatory images of the borderlands of the Southwest and the astonishing employ of English that feels primordial under his pen.
Once again, Cormac McCarthy tears me apart, digs at the darkest corners of despair and depravity in my mind, poking and prodding with a sharp stick as I wince and try to turn away. Yet unlike The Road, a black and white dystopian nightmare which offers redemption through the steadfast love of its principal characters, Blood Meridian is merciless Technicolor nihilism. Each character explores the vast possibilities of evil as McCarthy pulls the reader through the reeking entrails of history.
They found the lost scouts hanging head downward from the limbs of a fireblacked paloverde tree. They were skewered through the cords of their heels with sharpened shuttles of green wood and they hung gray and naked above the dead ashes of the coals where they’d been roasted until their heads had charred and the brains bubbled in the skulls and steam sang from their noseholes. Their tongues were drawn out and held with sharpened sticks thrust through them and they had been docked of their ears and their torsos were sliced open with flints until the entrails hung down their chests.
Blood Meridian is based on historical accounts of the Glanton Gang, a band of mercenaries that roamed the Texas-Mexico borderland in the mid-19th century, trading scalps for gold. Their initial objective was to pursue hostile Indian warriors who reigned by terror throughout the Borderlands. Eventually the crew of ex-soldiers, escaped slaves, convicts, marginalized immigrants, disenfranchised Indians and plain old thugs extended their quest for carnage to peaceful, agrarian Mexicans and Native Americans on both sides of the still-disputed border.
To read three hundred and fifty pages of unrelenting brutality, I have to give myself up to the prose, which is beautiful and original beyond compare, and to what I think the author sought to accomplish with his symphony of violence. I believe McCarthy offers the absolute opposite of the glorification of violence – he depicts horror to force the acknowledgment of it. His stories are blood-curdling pleas to recognize that we – as a nation, as a measure of humanity - are built on the back of history’s corpses. He decries the chest-thumping patriotism that is endemic to nations which claim moral superiority, generally by citing some sort of divine right. Scholar Sara Spurgeon in a critical essay of Blood Meridian (“The Sacred Hunter and the Eucharist of the Wilderness: Mythic Reconstructions in Blood Meridian”) declares the novel a “a sort of antimyth of the West.” There are no good guys in McCarthy’s depiction of the American West: there are only amoral murderers and the victims of their bloodlust. “Moral law is an invention of mankind for the disenfranchisement of the powerful in favor of the weak. Historical law subverts it at every turn.” Cunning words, spoken by a character who is the book’s Satan incarnate, its maniacal resident philosopher.
The danger of a book like this is that the reader must detach to make it through the gore. In comparison to The Road, where humility and love are present on every page and you have a sense the writer is suffering and weeping with you, the substance of Blood Meridian risks being subsumed by its intense and unrelenting style.
But without question Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West is yet another McCarthy entry in the canon of Great North American Literature....more
I feel honored when a book teaches me something new about reading, when a writer has the confidence in his story to pull no punches with his writing, I feel honored when a book teaches me something new about reading, when a writer has the confidence in his story to pull no punches with his writing, trusting in the reader’s intelligence to absorb a story without telling her what she should feel.
What Richard Ford teaches me with the exquisite Canada is patience. He teaches me to pull back, hold on, allow the plot to reel out while keeping a closer eye on the characters and their actions and reactions. What he offers in return for my patience is writing that makes me nearly weep with envy: clean yet evocative, each detail chosen to express character and place without eclipsing the reader's imagination.
The narrator, Dell Parsons, looks back across five decades to 1960, the year his mother and father robbed a bank in a small town in the plains of eastern Montana. From Dell's tone - sometimes tender, sometimes ironic but always mild and thoughtful - you are fairly certain he turns out okay, despite the crises he endured during his formative years. These crises take a while to unfold. Ford introduces the bank robbery in the novel's opening line, but maintains a brilliant balance between tension and torpidity by circling around the incident for more than one hundred pages.
In the interim he builds the portrait of a family who misses the mark of the American Dream. Bev Parsons, a husband with a handsome head in the clouds, leaves the Air Force and settles his wandering family in Great Falls, believing his charisma will lead to easy success, free from the structured demands of the military. He is mis-matched physically and intellectually with Neeva, his diminutive wife who rarely looks up from the drudgery of her life lest she be forced to acknowledge her disappointments. Their offspring - an awkward daughter saddled with an ugly face and the unfortunate name of Berner, and her younger-by-six-minutes twin, Dell, blessed with his father’s looks and an accommodating spirit – are raised with love, if not much stability.
Dell looks back at the decisions his parents made, at the moments when they approached the cliff and could have turned around, without judgment or bitterness. This is remarkable, because their foolishness upended his life; the bank robbery is only the beginning of a free fall that ends in murder, suicide and the dissolution of his family.
At the end of his life as he knows it, Dells sets out on a melancholy Odyssey from adolescence to adulthood. His internal journey first parallels a literal one as he is moved from Great Falls to Partreau, Saskatchewan, a near-ghost town in the desolate prairies of central Canada. And from there his story continues as he fends for himself in a small world of cast-off adults.
Canada's story is created by a landscape of reflection and resolution, of lives that turn on a dime, where the border between possibility and no turning back can be crossed only once, but consequences follow forever.
Ford’s deliberative style is like a skilled horse rider’s loose hold on the reins – he doesn’t need to make the obvious moves to steer the horse – it takes only a slight movement of thigh or heel to communicate his desires. Equally, Ford communicates soul-shifting menace through the subtleness of his characters and his setting- what he leaves out speaks to the power of what remains....more
I get the same rush of hands-rubbing-together glee buying a new writing guide as I do a new cookbook (well, almost - if only writing guides had drool-I get the same rush of hands-rubbing-together glee buying a new writing guide as I do a new cookbook (well, almost - if only writing guides had drool-inducing photographs of Truffled Saint-Marcellin or Bucatini all'Amatriciana or Salted Caramel (fill in the blank with anything).
An unread book on the craft of writing is full of possibility, of secrets waiting for revelation, of motivation and inspiration. It may contain the one thing I need to know that will turn my writing life around, the checklist I can follow that will make me a real writer, the advice that will level the uphill road and ensure a rejection letter will never again be addressed in my general direction.
Okay, I'm not that naive optimistic. Still, cracking open a famous author's literary toolbox and peering inside seems so hopeful and busy, like I'm thinking super hard about writing. When what I should be doing is, well, writing.
And about that famous author bit....have you ever heard of Priscilla Long? I sure hadn't, until I heard her speak at the Chuckanut Writers Conference in Bellingham this past June. She had me at, something - I've forgotten what it was she said - but I adored her. Modest, quiet, funny, pragmatic. And a ridiculously accomplished writer who works. Hard. Every day.
Enough of the preamble, the backstory, the poorly developed characters. Let me get right to the point:
You must read this.
Poring over the opening pages of this book coincided with writing the opening pages of my novel. Only a few weeks ago now, but I can't quite remember which came first. I finally gave in to the one thing that every author of a writing guide writes in their opening pages: You must write every day. Yeah, I know. I know. But look, I have a day job - writing every day isn't feasible. I already get up at the crack of dawn, earlier. I'm exhausted by the time I get home in the evenings. When am I supposed to do this writing? When do I get to work on what I want to work on, if I'm having to submit to the drudgery of a 15-20 minute free write, every day?
Excuses. That Priscilla Long finally gave me the courage to stop making. And it was so easy. Now I feel I have no other choice. And I'm thinking that if you aren't heeding Priscilla's advice by page 20, you should just stop reading this book until you can. The only thing that makes a writer a writer is writing. Every Day.
Thanks to my consistent daily free writing by hand, I have pages of scenes, character notes, setting sketches. Every day of scribbling brings me closer to my story, my characters, their motivations. I create and cover plot holes, I've literally sketched a bare bones layout of a stone cottage. I transcribe these daily writings into my Work In Progress on the computer and doing so leads to other scenes, ideas, characters.
And that, all from reading Chapter One.
The Writer's Portable Mentor is to a writer - of any level of experience and ambition - as much a toolbox as one of those gazillion-piece Craftsman tool sets is to an automotive repair pro. And Priscilla makes you work - there are no hypotheticals here. You take your writing, you take work of authors you admire, and you examine them and rework them, learning every step of the way.
I now keep a Lexicon notebook (right, so it was an excuse to buy what comes third in my bookstore thrill-seeking - after cookbooks and writing guides: Moleskine notebooks). But I have a growing collection of lovely, evocative, provocative, delicious words and sayings that I will find a way to use or to be inspired by: phrases such as back-lit light of polished steel (poet Mary Oliver), marzipan moon (author Hilary Mantel), as tender as an extension cord Pete Wells, restaurant critic, The New York Times; words like borage, palavering, sump, scialytic. It scares me to think of all the gorgeous words and phrases I've forgotten after forty years of reading!
I have several stories cooling in a drawer. I've chastised myself for not making the time or creating the courage to rework my pieces, research markets and submit them. Turns out I was wise to leave them sit, letting my thoughts sift, before returning to them with fresh, more critical eyes.
With Long's guidance on structure, openings, sentences, paragraphs, punctuation, word choice, revision, I'm tearing these stories apart and reassembling. And I will submit, resubmit - even those previously published - where possible. Long is very keen that you get your work out there - the creative process is not complete until you have attempted to share it with the world.
I will 'fess up: I did not do all the exercises. I did not comb through books I admire and craft my own sentences and paragraphs based on their models. I'm in too much of a groove with my writing and I don't want to slow the momentum. You can't be dogmatic about these things, any more than you can cook every single recipe in a cookbook and blog about it, then write a bestseller that will become a major motion picture starring Meryl Streep, now can you? Oh, wait...
This isn't the be all and end all of writing guides - there are so many astonishing and revelatory works to discover and reread - several that are on my list to explore for the first time, many others I return to for inspiration and practical advice. But if asked to make a Desert Island decision- if I could take only one book - my choice would be clear:
I'd take my writing-practice notebook. And a pen. Thanks, Priscilla.
My four days with this book began with a reading by the author. Hearing Terry Tempest Williams' words and the story of her mother's journals in her voMy four days with this book began with a reading by the author. Hearing Terry Tempest Williams' words and the story of her mother's journals in her voice was moving and memorable. Her elegant, warm cadence echoed as I opened the book the morning after her talk to read and reread her insights on voice, women, relationships, loss and love.
I have been estranged from my mother for twenty years; to be nurtured in the vast love and faith of a mother like Williams' is not beyond my comprehension, but it is beyond my experience. Yet I rejoiced for her and the beautiful bond she shared with her mother, and continues to share with her father, John. John Tempest was present at the reading and he shared his thoughts on the mystery of Diane Tempest's journals.
The two days that followed, as I continued to read these "variations on voice", were days of joyous discovery and exploration of my voice as a writer. The final day was one of dreaded and terrible loss as a woman. "When Women Were Birds" provided inspiration and comfort and will remain a point of reference as I explore the meaning of these days of late June 2012.
Not every chapter speaks to me - the essays describing her battles over conservation issues - as vital as these are to the essence of Terry Tempest Williams - feel as if they belong to another time and place; they don't feel central to this book's theme, which is far more intimate. Or perhaps these memories aren't central to MY present theme. Perhaps a different time and state of mind will open my ears to these voices the author is seeking to reveal.
This slim, meditative and beautifully presented volume will forever mark a beginning and an end to the truth of my life.
Not often, but now and again there's a moment when the heart cries aloud: yes, I am willing to be that wild darkness, that long, blue body of light.
Mary Not often, but now and again there's a moment when the heart cries aloud: yes, I am willing to be that wild darkness, that long, blue body of light.
There are large holes in my reading experience—works by acclaimed authors I ought perhaps to have read by now, novels that have created genres, shapedThere are large holes in my reading experience—works by acclaimed authors I ought perhaps to have read by now, novels that have created genres, shaped cultures, and incited passions. There are writers I have tried to read—really, I have—but whose styles made me want to engage in self-flagellation as the lesser of two tortures: William Faulkner, John Updike, Gabriel García Márquez; others whose classics I promise to tackle someday, when I'm smarter and less distracted: James Joyce, Nikolai Gogol, Herman Melville.
Then there are those celebrated writers who choose subject matter or settings which don't much interest me. With some significant exceptions, I've never been keen on books set in the Deep South or in America's West or in a dystopian near future. So, I've always passed on Cormac McCarthy.
Certainly, The Road was never going to be my cuppa. Grim, post-apocalyptic and hopeless are not for this reader who prizes sinking into a good story above all. But when I read reviews as passionate as Nandakishore Varma's or as insightful as Jay 's—who puts McCarthy on the same high rung as two of my favorite authors: Tim Winton and Colm Tóibín—I know I am missing something great.
Why I started with The Road and why I read it during a painful, angry, bleak period in my life really don't matter in the end. Because by the end of The Road, which I soaked up, transfixed, in a day, I was a reader and writer transformed.
To read The Road is to experience a prose writer as poet, forming a narrative in which each word has weight and meaning and each sentence has a rhythm, which the omission of punctuation and manipulation of words create something recognizable but unfamiliar; techniques that work in concert to shape the mood, tone and color of each scene:
He started down the rough wooden steps. He ducked his head and then flicked the lighter and swung the flame out over the darkness like an offering. Coldness and damp. An ungodly stench. The boy clutched at his coat. He could see part of a stone wall. Clay floor. An old mattress darkly stained. He crouched and stepped down again and held out the light. Huddled against the back wall were naked people, male and female, all trying to hide, shielding their faces with their hands. On the mattress lay a man with his legs gone to the hip and the stumps of them blackened and burnt. The smell was hideous.
When you read this paragraph aloud, you breathe along with the man. You take in what he sees and smells, the horror dawning as the weak light of the flame reveals a Holocaust.
Be warned, for three hundred pages of a living nightmare will shatter your soul. But the brutality is balanced by a tender and beautiful relationship between the man and his son. McCarthy's story, absent of all sentimentality and sheared of all hope, still allows us to believe in mercy and dignity.
The reader never learns why the world was nearly destroyed or by whom or what. The plot is as bare as the blasted out forests and abandoned cities that the man and his son trudge past on their way south, to the ocean. We never learn what they hope to find there, at the water's edge, at the end of their world. The past and the future are not relevant to The Road. Only the present journey matters, and it serves as a warning to a world in grave danger of losing its way.
I don't know that I could read The Road again. But I will return to passages, to be reminded of the power of word choice and placement, the poetry of well-crafted prose. And although I know this novel stands apart from others in McCarthy's œuvre, I look forward to exploring more of his world....more
I admit to having a bit of a crush on Thomas Cromwell. All right, he's a bit long in the tooth for me, a perhaps a bit round from the life at court thI admit to having a bit of a crush on Thomas Cromwell. All right, he's a bit long in the tooth for me, a perhaps a bit round from the life at court that fills his plate and goblet with rich food and drink. And more than a bit too cruel, as he neatly dispatches obstacles to the nearest hangman's noose or executioner's blade.
But there is so much to admire in the man who sits at the right hand of Henry VIII. Thomas Cromwell, a commoner who escaped his father's fists at the age of fifteen, claims his fortune abroad and uses his cleverness and charisma to rise past sycophantic noblemen. He earns the trust of those who make the seats of power until the King claims him as his chief minister. Cromwell, as interpreted by Hilary Mantel, is sardonic with the fools who surround the king, vying for his attention. He is tender with his family - what remains of them after disease robs him of his wife and daughters. He is generous with his household, kind to the poor. And with himself he is circumspect, modest, resigned to his flaws. Irreverent, intelligent, kind, earthy - just a little bit sexy, you know? What's not to like?
Unless, of course, you are Anne Boleyn.
Hilary Mantel's brilliant, impossible-to-put-down Bring Up The Bodies is her lively follow-up to the Man Booker winning Wolf Hall. Which really, you've got to read first. It's not that you don't know what happens in Bring Up The Bodies (if you didn't sleep through that day in your European History survey course). We know Anne's head remains not long attached to her "little neck." But Mantel is such a master of character and of the subtlest of details upon which the globe of history spins - you'd be doing yourself a huge disservice not to soak up the first of her (anticipated many) volumes of the life and times of Thomas Cromwell. Bring Up the Bodies makes references to the recent past of Wolf Hall and its now-deceased characters, so just read it. It's as least as astonishing.
And I admit to having a writerly crush on Hilary Mantel. She takes the notion of historical fiction and upends it, smashes it to bits and then puts it back together in her crazy-unique way of writing. This is Tudor England, but presented in an entirely new way. No over-wrought 16th century language, no bodice-ripping trysts in candlelit corridors (oh, maybe just a few). Mantel writes in standard English, with cryptic Cromwell as her narrator. Her story, rooted in iconic history, feels as fresh and relevant as the headlines of today's morning paper. It is history such as you have never considered before; meticulously researched- to the point that Mantel need only drop in a few key details to create a setting, then she lets the action carry the rest of the scene.
I love Mantel's use of language. It is modern but never anachronistic, never ironic. The joke is not on the reader, it is on common interpretations of history. Cromwell narrates in present tense, setting the reader in the middle of the action, rather than as an observer, several centuries removed. Mantel gives me such a different way to think about presenting history - what we know becomes the outline, the foundation. The shadowy, the obscure, become the story.
I know what happens next - my history books tell me the facts. What I don't know is how Hilary Mantel will tell the story. I can hardly wait. ...more
When I read novels such as Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter, I just want to close up shop, put the cap on all my pens, shred every last page of my notebWhen I read novels such as Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter, I just want to close up shop, put the cap on all my pens, shred every last page of my notebooks, disconnect the laptop and call it a writing life. 'Cause this is da bomb, baby. This is how to write a STORY.
The novel transcends genre. It is part literary thriller, part Southern Gothic drama and one hundred-percent perfectly crafted, without ever feeling composed. From setting to tone to pacing to character development, there is a sense of oneness. It's like examining a familiar painting close enough to see the individual brush strokes or dots. As discrete marks, they have no meaning. It isn't until you move back again that the marvel of the craftmanship strikes you. That's what a good story does - it offers you a seamless intellectual and emotional reading experience.
What I find most intriguing is the way Franklin uses the atmosphere of his rural Mississippi setting to inform the suspense. Moving between the late 1970s and the late 2000s, the story is shrouded by layers of kudzu and dense forest, where Timber rattlesnakes and Southern cottonmouths lurk in the shadows. The setting is a metaphor for the search for truth, which is mired in layers of suspicion and lies and where innocents are menaced by villains. It also sets the tone, which is grimy with sweat from the thick and languid anticipation or bone-chilling from the rejection of a tiny, cold community. The tension is mostly quiet, the characters move in isolation, the memories private and sad. But within the forest, which looks so cool and peaceful from the outside, lurks a killer. The forest spirits away young women and the clues decay in the hot, wet night.
The setting, at once creepy and bucolic, also informs the complicated history of this region. From its hidden-in-plain-sight legacy of Jim Crow to the intimate nature of community shunning, Franklin never lets the reader relax into familiar cliches. Even the characters you come to trust have black spots that could fester and rot unless they grasp onto the grace of their morality.
The most persecuted character is Larry, a middle-aged white man suspected since high school of murdering a young woman. No body was ever found, no leads ever solidify to justify an arrest, yet the community cannot forget nor forgive.
Larry lives alone, rising each day to open the automotive repair shop that only strangers ever patronize. He subsists off TV dinners, horror novels and his memories, the happiest of which are of the days in his early childhood when he had one friend. That friend was Silas, a black child who lived with his single mother in a tattered cabin on Larry's father's property. Raised by a single mom, his paternal heritage a mystery, Silas becomes a secret companion to the awkward, bookish, unpopular Larry. The friendship fades as Silas becomes a high school athlete of renown and leaves the area to attend university. He returns many years later to his southeast Mississippi hometown to take up a quiet post in law enforcement in a community where bar fights, meth labs and wildlife poaching are the greatest hazards. That is, until the daughter of the region's wealthiest man disappears. And Larry is once again the prime suspect of foul play.
And that's enough of the plot. It runs too deeply and is too ripe for spoilers to discuss further. For within a murder mystery lie other mysteries -- of friendship, family and community. Like a Russian matryoshka doll, the story reveals a series of discoveries until at last it ends, with the final truth.
I read this in a day. And now I don't quite know what to do with myself. ...more
In the late 19th century a large number of shipwrecks led to tales of atrocities committed by those who survived; many were put on trial under chargesIn the late 19th century a large number of shipwrecks led to tales of atrocities committed by those who survived; many were put on trial under charges of murder and cannibalism. Charlotte Rogan recalls these accounts and marries them with the early 20th century ocean liner disasters of the Titanic and Lusitania to create a harrowing exposition of human behavior.
In 1914, en route from Britain to American, an ocean liner capsizes after a mysterious on-board explosion. Several life boats are filled and launched. In one is Grace Winter, the story's narrator. Grace, a newlywed, fears for the fate of her husband, Henry, from whom she was separated in the chaos as the ship capsized. She joins thirty-eight other survivors in a lifeboat that is designed to hold half that number. These passengers - literally adrift - become psychologically and morally so as the days pass and the odds of surviving dwindle.
We know from the opening prologue that Grace is rescued and is now on trial for her life. The story's tension, therefore, is not a matter of if, but how and who. Rogan masterfully maintains this tension by revealing the story through Grace's wobbly perspective. The reader has an unshakeable sense that this young woman cultivates a naive and winsome appearance to disguise the cunning and narcissism she has honed to survive life's misfortunes. But who are we to judge? Who knows which sides of ourselves we may be forced to call upon when our lives depend upon it?
And the author does not judge. She creates a claustrophobic and haunting world set upon a merciless sea and lets Fate and the survivors' shifting morals shape events. She allows paranoia to seep into the cutty, hinting at greater plots afoot, but restricts the reader's vision to Grace's self-serving memories.
As compact as this story is, it drags in the middle, as if the author was seeking to stretch the narrative out to reach a full-length novel minimum word count. There is a limit to the dramatic impact of scenes of bailing water and huddling together for warmth. But that is a faint complaint of an otherwise compelling and well-crafted thriller. ...more
The dank and dangerous cylinder of a new well, where the walls could collapse at any moment, crushing the digger in a muddy grave; a valley so overwheThe dank and dangerous cylinder of a new well, where the walls could collapse at any moment, crushing the digger in a muddy grave; a valley so overwhelmed by a cliff of granite that light shudders and dies in its wet shadow; a voice choked from sound, leaving a man trapped in silence; a young woman isolated by fear and suspicion in a remote mountain cabin: these are the acedian images Ron Rash writes to sobering effect in The Cove.
This is a novel of a place seemingly suspended in time, a forgotten hollow in the Blue Ridge mountains of western North Carolina, where venomous snakes slither, wild parakeets flit like flocks of bright green faeries and where residents still believe in witches' curses. But the modern world invades this isolated land with the wounded and dead from European trenches. As their broken bodies are returned home, fear of the enemy Hun incites public hysteria.
Rash weaves a story with themes that ring loudly to the present-day: how patriotism can be a mask for prejudice and a justification for violence, how war robs us of our sensibilities as well as our citizens.Yet instead of stating the obvious, he shows us with an atmospheric mystery that runs languid on the surface, but races with an unstoppable current in depths you cannot fathom.
The Cove is written in an opalescent and mannered style that is reminiscent of a 19th century Gothic romance. It abounds with literary archetypes: a persecuted young woman dreaming of escape and the love of a strong man; a mysterious stranger who speaks with music rather than words; a wealthy young villain with delusions of grandeur; a Greek chorus of simple country folk; a gruff but well-meaning brother. We know these characters because they have been with us from our earliest memories of faerie tales and mythology. We sense that our star-crossed lovers will fare no better than Romeo and Juliet; we are wiser than to hope for a hero. Whether or not a hero appears is for you to discover.
The novel's flaws can be found in Rash's over-simplification of the pretentious and cowardly Army recruiter, Chauncey Feith, and the backward suspicions of the townsfolk. He also dwells overlong on Laurel's isolation and loneliness and treats her response to romance with little-girl wonder, which nearly degrades her character rather than invoking the reader's empathy.
Despite some of the weaker character development, this reader is delighted to have discovered a writer who can craft a powerful story with captivating language. ...more
I considered mounting a passionate defense in favor of this lovingly-rendered tribute to Jane Austen, but then I decided I couldn't care less what theI considered mounting a passionate defense in favor of this lovingly-rendered tribute to Jane Austen, but then I decided I couldn't care less what the naysayers think. If you pick up this gentle whodunit expecting the sartorial sleuthing of Commander Adam Dalgliesh, you will be disappointed. If you read this looking for the ghost of Jane Austen, you will catch but a glimpse of her delicate frame. Although the point of fan-fiction escapes me entirely (I can't help but think of tribute bands; I have no more desire to explore fan-fiction than I would to see my approaching-middle-age cohorts belt out Whitesnake's greatest hits), Death Comes to Pemberley reads like a tender squeeze of affection from one national literary treasure to another.
If you do sink into this literary treat, know that your Jane ear will delight in the recaptured cadence of her prose and that you will be enchanted by the sense and sensibilities of Regency Britain. You will encounter familiar names and faces from across the Austen oeuvre; you will be moved by James's piquant touches of the political and social realities of the era.
If you aren't able to let go and enjoy Death Comes to Pemberley within its opening pages, put it down, walk away and spend your time reading something better suited to your expectations.
P.D. James isn't so many years from meeting Jane in that Great Bibliotheque in the Sky. I can just see these two outrageously smart, sublime writers sharing a pot of tea and chatting about their writing lives. To curl up in a damask wing chair before a merry fire, listening to Jane and Phyllis plotting out a meeting between Adam Dalgliesh and Fitzwilliam Darcy is my vision of heaven....more
Lauren Groff’s lovely and poignant Arcadia is a novel of sublime sensuality. It is redolent of the ripe, husky scent of pot and unwashed bodies, the sLauren Groff’s lovely and poignant Arcadia is a novel of sublime sensuality. It is redolent of the ripe, husky scent of pot and unwashed bodies, the strumming of guitars and gasps of lovemaking, the taste of warm blackberries plucked from the bush and popped into the mouth, the glow of naked flesh in moonlight, the feel of a mother’s soft, full breast, of a father’s muscled, callused hands.
The key to the novel’s earthy nature is its narrator, Bit, who begins his story at the age of five. Children are the most sensual of human beings; they live in the moment, using all their senses in equal measure, without discernment, complete in their physical selves and open to the world as it unfolds.
Bit is one of several dozen residents of a growing commune, Arcadia, in upstate New York. Arcadia takes shape in the early 1970's - shortly after Bit's birth - as a scattered collection of musicians, hippies, romantics, runaways and recovering drug addicts move from a hovel of tents, shacks and buses into a dilapidated mansion. There they create a home, a life sustained by communal work, education, friendship, music, sex and drugs. Bit is raised to adolescence in this agrarian Utopia, separated from the hazards of the world (which include sugar, animal by-products, television and currency), surrounded by the constancy of his parents, Abe and Hannah, and by a community that protects and embraces this quiet and keen observer.
It seems to me that residents of a commune choose the most child-like way of life, striving to accept the world on its terms, trusting in the willingness of their fellow residents to work and play together in harmony. Yet, children are also selfish creatures, who cooperate and share only when it is in their best interest. The residents of Arcadia play at leaderless democracy, but into the void between communal decision making and anarchy, steps the charismatic father-figure Handy and his Scandinavian goddess-wife Astrid. Even those who openly resist his authority, including Bit's parents, seek his approval. Handy creates Arcadia in his own image, yet follows none of his own rules, becoming the serpent that brings Eden to the point of collapse.
Groff's language and syntax are intoxicating. She writes in lush and languid tones, as Bit rotates through years harmonious and troubled. At times the scenes are heavy with malaise, as Bit witnesses the grind of his mother's midwinter depression. At times they are as pointed as a young girl's hipbones, as she exposes her characters to brutality and desperation. And at times they are hushed and soft, as we watch a man and his daughter give comfort to a loved one during her final days. Groff offers us Bit's perspective in third-person present tense, which allows us to experience Arcadia in real time, to be as present as the characters, to exist within a child's mind yet to remain detached observers.
Bit’s story continues into his adolescence, which is set against the Reagan years of the Cold War and rising American prosperity. The story ends in a future most of us can see if we squint and tilt our heads just so. Bit is now a father of a teenager and returns to the site of the old commune to care for his dying mother. The world is in quarantine, retreating from a deadly flu flung out from Southeast Asia.
Bit's life moves from Utopia to Armageddon. But when Bit returns to the place where his life began, he is able to recapture the spirit of hope of its best times and set free the bitter demons of its worst. Through the grace of Groff's rich prose, the reader moves in bittersweet concert with Bit and with the dream that is Arcadia.
If you haven't been to Paris, you just won't get A Moveable Feast... If you aren't already a fan of Hemingway, don't bother reading A Moveable Feast
LIf you haven't been to Paris, you just won't get A Moveable Feast... If you aren't already a fan of Hemingway, don't bother reading A Moveable Feast
Look, I'm struggling to get a start on this review and those were the first two statements that popped into my head. I don't know if they are true. I don't know if they are fair. So I crossed them out. What I do know is this work - fiction, memoir, sketches, a polished diary - whichever of these it may be - wouldn't exist without Paris. Obviously, right? No, that's not what I mean. I mean Paris is to writers as Burgundy is to Pinot Noir. It's all about terroir - that sense of place, climate, geography, culture that shape the flavor and texture of a thing. You can make great wine out of pinot grown in Oregon, New Zealand, Chile - but it will never, ever approximate the glory of Burgundy. Writers can write with greatness anywhere in the world, but a writer in Paris - and goodness, a writer in the vintage years of the early-mid 1920's - is a singularly-blessed creature who may pour forth with words that change the world.
Hyperbole? Ah, well, I guess you've never been to Paris.
I bought a cheap, paperback copy of A Moveable Feast at Shakespeare and Company last winter. I'd spent the day retracing the steps of the Lost Generation through the 5eme and 6eme Arrondissements: the Luxembourg Gardens, Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Rue Mouffetard, Rue du Cardinal Lemoine, La Place Contrescarpe, Rue Descartes, Quai des Grands-Augustins -- the haunts of Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Picasso, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Ford Maddox Ford as they drank and smoked and wrote their way between the wars. Other than the now-phony tourist traps of Les Deux Magots and Café de Flore and the relocated Shakespeare and Company bookshop (opened in its current location at 37 rue de la Bûcherie in 1951 after the original shop was closed in 1941 during the Occupation of Paris), much is as I imagined it was in 1924. The light shines golden and bittersweet in the narrow streets, landlocked Parisians flock to chaises longues in the Luxembourg Gardens to soak up an unseasonably warm February sun, students at the Sorbonne crowd the coffee shops in between classes, smoking, flirting and speaking in a rapid-fire Parisian slang that I was hopeless to comprehend.
My paperback copy of A Moveable Feast is now dreadfully dog-eared. I have marked passage upon passage in which Hemingway talks about writing - he was so disciplined and therefore so productive - which weakened my knees: "I would stand and look out over the rooftops of Paris and think, "Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence, and go on from there."
or about Paris: "You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintry light. But you knew there would always be spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen."
or about wine "In Europe then we thought of wine as something as healthy and normal as food and also as a great giver of happiness and well-being and delight. Drinking wine was not a snobbism nor a sign of sophistication nor a cult; it was as natural as eating and to me as necessary... "
This is a collection of sketches of a writer as he remembers his happiest, purest days spent healing from the injuries and horrors of World War I, in love with a devoted wife and a round, sweet baby, being discovered by artists of influence and nurturing others through their own addictions and afflictions. Of course we know that Hemingway's own story does not end well. As he pens what will become the final paragraphs of A Moveable Feast many years later, he recognizes how fragile and temporary were those years: "But we were not invulnerable and that was the end of the first part of Paris, and Paris was never to be the same again although it was always Paris and you changed as it changed.... this is how Paris was in the early days when we were very poor and very happy."
Perhaps the one true condition of enjoying this memoir is that one must be an incurable romantic. An affliction I bear with pride....more
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