I am regrettably behind on my book reviews. With my current state of existence this is not surprising. I have so many balls up in the air that I don’t remember having tossed them up there in the first place. More on that when I get a chance.

The Ballad of the Sad Cafe is, in fact, sad. So sad it resonates with the sadness behind it: Carson McCullers must have been sad herself. It feels too personally acquainted with sad to have been fabricated; McCullers might have been a genius but I still think she didn’t entirely make this up.

McCullers tells a story of a doomed and miserable southern town, its misfits, and unrequited love. She has a tenderness for freaks–our protagonist, Miss Amelia, is a six-foot-two giantess who becomes hopeless obsessed with a warped hunchback. Miss Amelia is flint-spined, a bootlegging businesswoman with a ferocious streak, but, like the other characters in the story struck by love, is hopeless and floppy in the face of her beloved.

While the plot weaves its love triangle ways, the thrumming feeling of “there is no hope, there is no hope” runs beneath it. McCullers captures the stifling dullness of a southern small town but pins her characters to it like bugs under glass. Poor things.

This collection included several other short stories, most of which were riffs on love. Some were sensitive and lyrical: one touches on a wife’s alcoholism in suburbia, another the end of prodigy for a young girl. Others: slightly more forgettable.

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Library Thing Early Reviewers

Tags: Books, fiction, reading, review, short stories, the south

The second of two LibraryThing Early Reviewer books I’m reading and reviewing this month. Peripheral Vision will be UK author Patricia Ferguson’s first novel published in the U.S. Two of her previous novels were long-listed for the Orange Prize. The book will be available within the next few weeks from Other Press, distributed by Random House. As always, my appreciation to LibraryThing and the participating publishers.

As a memory this book exists in snatches: the protagonist’s mother’s bucolic dog kennels, cancer, explicit and unforgiving medical procedures, stiff wool post-war suits and the void where love should be. Brazenly British and medically intricate (one might say too intricate, especially if squeamish), Patricia Ferguson’s first US-published novel tracks the subtly-intertwining lives of three 20th-century women across time. In doing so it breaks no real new ground, but it provides a comfortable and undemanding casual read.

Ferguson shines most when she is writing about her mid-century characters. Her post-war British landscape feels surreal, harsh and at times fantastical. It is a time of dying aristocracy, snobbery and early household appliances. Stiff upper lip. Iris, the heavy-handedly named working-class nurse, is intriguing enough to keep one reading.

Her modern characters–our protagonist, Sylvia, is a rigid and competent eye surgeon–feel flatter, going about their daily urban lives and having their Oprah moments. What makes them compelling? Aside from Sylvia’s inability to love her infant daughter (well executed), it’s hard to say.

A couple of times in the book Ferguson seems close to capturing an emotion in essence, as when Rob (one of our post-war characters) muses about being in love:

“A great many things had stopped worrying Rob. Sometimes, hurrying down a corridor or along a pavement, happiness required him to leap up, arm outstretched, to touch the light-fitting or branch high overhead. He was always hungry. When alone he slept deeply, dreamlessly. He grew an inch.”

Overall, though, the writing is efficient, not profound enough to flash your heart alight. There is the expected tragic love and redemption, but the true nature of the characters’ entanglement is an odd reveal near the end of the book: a spray of confusing details that feels too specific to be interesting.

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Library Thing Early Reviewers

Tags: advanced reading copy, arc, Books, british, early reviewer, novel, random house, reading, review

This is the first of two LibraryThing Early Reviewer books I’m reading this month. Though I actually finished it second, the review was easier to write. My appreciation as always to LibraryThing and the participating publishers.

Holding the book Firmin as it is now, with its novella-like thinness and its stylized bite out of the side (makes for uncomfortable reading, being right where your thumbs would normally go), it’s easy to confuse it for something it’s not.

“Is this a children’s book?” was my first reflection. It has a crude drawing of a rat on the cover. It’s about a rat who lives in the basement of a Boston bookstore and reads and reads and reads and wants to be, Pinnochio-like, human. How charming. It’s a book whose actual shape is a gimmick. Let’s class it as a stocking-stuffer, a modern fable perhaps to be wrapped up with Coehlo’s The Alchemist and foisted off on some relative looking for some comforting but tepid philosophy.

Except, you’d be wrong. I was wrong.

Within a few pages, Firmin is clawing out his story: a desperate and raw dirge. His metaphorical yarn bemoans the traditionally ominous inhuman machines of progress as they triumph over sloppy–but much more meaningful–things like literature and love. This is a fable, sure, but it is one of viscera and coitus, redemption and meaning.

Born by chance in a bookstore, Firmin reacts to the innately marginal position of his species by (inexplicably) learning to read. His littermates follow in the primal footsteps of their alcoholic mother, all teeth and primitive drives, but Firmin finds the vaunted world of literature and is transformed by it. He reads everything, and loves it, except, if you don’t yet believe he isn’t cute:

“The only literature I cannot abide is rat literature, including mouse literature. I despise good-natured Ratty in The Wind in the Willows. I piss down the throats of Mickey Mouse and Stuart Little. Affable, shuffling, cute, they stick in my craw like fish bones.”

It’s not for kids. It’s not even for especially sensitive adults. It’s tone sometimes reaches mildly hopeful only to be drop-kicked down into a very dirty alley full of specters and sadness. Firmin is a sociopath, or at least delusional. He sees meaning where there is none and experiences interactions that don’t actually occur. He is, fundamentally, alone. And that’s where the sadness really festers.

Here is a rat who obsessively reads books on sign language, wretchedly trying to learn to gesture the phrase “What do you like to read?” Absent digits and opposable thumbs, the best thing he can learn to shudder out is “goodbye zipper,” which gets him about as far as it sounds like it would.

Behind this, a story about the demise of Scollay Square in Boston (wherein is located Firmin’s bookstore), with the expected lamentation about the boarded-up storefronts and abandoned buildings. It’s not a poor choice of backgrounds, but against Firmin’s story it seems jarringly anthropomorphic, occasionally distracting.

Firmin leaves a haunting miasma behind. It’s not an easy book, despite its length, and one has to take care to find the hope in the hopelessness. But it is a thought-provoking one, one for savoring and considering, perhaps remembering.

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Tags: Books, early reviewer, fiction, reading, review

If Out Stealing Horses were to be unraveled and performed as music it would sound something like Phillip Glass: modern, haunting, impenetrable. The sentences demand to be considered one word at a time, with minimal internal pause. Like arpeggios.

Yet minimalism is not a fair descriptor. The prose is not coy, but it is not basic, either. True to Nordic legacy, it is clean and reserved, but it becomes obvious that it’s a frozen, formal layer of ice over an emotional fjord of imponderable depth. The very paragraphs are walls that the protagonist, Trond, erects between himself and the reader. His own self-imposed isolation–he would say solitude, definitely not loneliness–is built into the sounds and shapes of the story.

In his sixties, three years a widower, Trond has packed up and left the city to live in a ramshackle cabin in the Norwegian countryside. Not quite a misanthrope, not exactly a curmudgeon, he insists that his need for human companionship is minimal. But his seclusion opens a link to memories: summer 1948, just after the war, a summer like a hinge in his life, a summer of death and complexity and love and abandonment.

Out Stealing Horses is, among other thing, a collection of echoes, balances. We meet two sets of twins: one from each pair will be shot to death. Jon, Trond’s young contemporary and partner in boyish summer hijinx, ripples with a submerged evil; yet the brutish, teenage German guards stationed in the village are likeable and naive. Trond’s boyhood fear of trees falling finally comes to pass, requiring help from someone of great coincidence who has the power to answer the greatest question of Trond’s life.

Petterson’s telling of the forests, rivers of Norway are wrenching in their clarity. The landscape doesn’t feel charming or sentimentalized. It feels like nature: cold and wet and beautiful, but not picturesque. The weather is harsh much of the time, the sky gray and dim, the great northern forest endless. It snows, lakes crust over with autumn ice.

The Nobel committee recently chastised American writers, insinuating that we won’t be seeing any Nobel winners until we emerge from our literary isolation: only a paltry percentage of the books we read are translated, and the general mood in the American literary style is to look within for inspiration. When I first heard this, I was offended. I thought the Nobel committee was being petty, not realizing that much of the reason we read so many American novels in America is because so many novels–and by extrapolation, so many good novels–were being written right here near us.

But reading this novel changed my viewpoint slightly. I was reminded that different language doesn’t just mean replacing sounds with slightly different sounds, it means a whole different structure. A whole different way to patch together sentences and thoughts. Different patterns of expression, and even thinking. While I have been assiduous in reading the Greek and Roman classics, I have not taken the care to balance my modern reading to have an international, worldly scope. I am inspired to change.

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Tags: Books, reading, review

There is a world in this book, a world that Eliot has wrapped up and commentated for us and handed to us for posterity. As such, a world is too much to master in a single read, and I know my careful yet single experience with this story is not enough.

The world of Middlemarch is populated by characters with the complexity of planets (they have their own weather systems of cause, continents of pathos) orbited by archetypical small-town satellites (bloviators, horse traders, shrews, useless gentlefolk).

Our fair protagonist, Dorothea Brooke, navigates the treachery of pastoral pre-Victorian England with as much tact and grace as can be possible, pitting her own individuality against the fatiguing winds of her prescribed fate. She defends herself from the inevitable (married, dull, subjugated life) with several sequential fronts: idealistic, self-effacing religiosity; ascetic academic ardor; resigned but noble widow. Of course, none of these withstand because they are false fronts to a personality too deep to be hidden.

The other planets of Middlemarch’s solar system (Eliot would say “web”, but I’ll broker my own metaphor here) are also simultaneously idiosyncratic and stereotypical. Rosamond Lydgate (nee Vincy) is so syrupy and materialistic that one spends much of the time wanting to give her a good wallop, and yet, cracks appear: what other power has she beyond nagging her husband? How can she have any control over her life without deceit? Conflicts like these characterize Eliot’s presentation of the sweeping social changes in 19th-century Britain.

The intrepid explorer of this universe needs patience and a careful eye. Eliot’s phrasing is recursive and deep, with clauses tucking into other clauses and sentences many lines long. References are dense and arcane (to the dismay of readers who might like to think of themselves as well-read); a well-noted edition is recommended (the Penguin Classics series is a good bet). Despite the length (almost 850 pages) and wordiness, be warned: Eliot means what she writes. This is not padding. Every sentence has its place, every description has its meaning.

If you’re paying attention and taking good scientific samples, what you’ll bring back from this expedition is an understanding of a world, frozen in time, and the seismic changes it is about to shudder through. You might understand better how women’s coming emancipation, a newly-enfranchised populace, and a value system redefined to encompass industry and self-made success posed such a monumental threat to the steady, patriarchal aristocracy that had been the center of this universe for so many centuries.

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Tags: Books, novel, reading, review, victorian