Open a book this minute and start reading. Don’t move until you’ve reached page fifty. Until you’ve buried your thoughts in print. Cover yourself with words. Wash yourself away. Dissolve.
Carol Shields
Republic of Love
|
What’s new for 2012?
I hope to rediscover my passion for the works of Australian women writers.
I’m planning to read more speculative fiction (including dystopian fiction, which scares the beejeebies outa me) and tonnes of fairy-tales and wonder-tales.
And lots of chunky books. Well, okay, more than last year: how’s that?
And for February? How many books can I read with Black History Month in mind? How many can you read? How many could WE read…
I’m BuriedInAllKindsOfGoodPrint these days. Hope you are too!
(First time here? Please don’t be shy: there’s no such thing as too much bookchat!)
 We were introduced in 2001, when an English reading friend recommended her novel Angel to me, which I read in a single day.
It immediately seemed like one of those books with which I’d always been familiar. And its author was secured on my Must Read Everything list.
Inside my book remains a copy of the two-page letter sent to my friend, which marvelled at the author’s ability to bring such a dislikeable character off the page and into my reader’s heart.
Since then, I’ve read seven of her novels, and not one has nudged her work out of my MRE intentions. And this fits beautifully with Laura’s planned Centenary Celebration of her work this year.
(Check out Laura’s post, which includes the scheduled reads, a contact form, and a list of the hosts who will be participating in the celebration, including Rachel, who has already posted about her hosting of Palladian next month.)
This month’s read is Elizabeth Taylor’s first novel, At Mrs. Lippincote’s.
I first read this novel in 2004: a borrowed first-edition from the local university library, the occasional page gummed or stained, its spine solidly aslant.
My current copy is a library discard: an original green-spined copy, with its corners dog-eared, its pages substantially yellowed, its spine badly broken in three places, and a small part of the image on the cover torn off completely.
But in both cases, these worn-out books suit the story perfectly.
For in Elizabeth Taylor’s novel, Julia has moved into another woman’s house, with all the remnants of other lives lived therein, just as I’ve settled into this edition of the novel, with all the marks and scars that other readers have left behind.
 At Mrs Lippincote’s considers Julia’s adjustment to wartime housing, which has, until recently, been occupied by the Lippincote family.
“She went downstairs, groping through shadow, not knowing where the light switches were, her hands passing over the walls, which felt clammy and unfamiliar.”
It’s an innocuous passage. And, indeed, eight years after this novel was published, the author wrote that “I also very much like reading books in which practically nothing ever happens.”
But there is something slightly foreboding about Julia’s journey downstairs, about her deep sense of unease that first night in Mrs Lippincote’s home, and about the tactility of various plot elements, and it’s not because of the discussion which opens the novel, about whether Mr Lippincote would have died there.
This is a novel rooted not, however, in suspense, but in tension. The drama of At Mrs Lippincote’s is rooted in the small push-and-pull details of everyday life in a house occupied by a husband, a wife, a son, and a cousin. It revolves around the questions of identity, loneliness and the ordinary connections and disconnections that draw us closer and splinter us.
On one hand, it’s easy to see how readily Elizabeth Taylor’s novels have been dismissed as “domestic fiction”, “light reading”, “women’s novels”. They read very quickly, and with the exception of uncomfortable moments in which the truths revealed are harsh and unpleasant, they read easily.
But, in fact, the novels are quite tightly crafted. Once you have finished this novel, in particular, if you revisit the novel’s first chapter, it’s surprising how layered some of the meaning in various passages becomes.
Even without re-reading, however, the author’s incisive observations are a pleasure to read.
Elizabeth Taylor has acutely attended to the ins-and-outs of ordinary conversations and patterns of relating, and one has the sense of immediately understanding even those characters whose roles are relatively minor.
Take, for example, this description of Eleanor, the unmarried cousin, who lives with Julia and Roddy:
“’I thought it was only spinsters who behaved in that neurotic way.’ She was forty and unmarried, she had a little money in Imperial Tobacco, a royal-blue evening dress, and was in love with her cousin, for whom, as they say, she would have laid down her life with every satisfaction.”
Or, Julia’s observations of the Wing Commander’s wife:
“She twitters. Like all the wives of somber men, she froths and seethes and bubbles, keeps herself at boiling-point ready for emergencies.”
Finally, the presentation of Edwards, who alters his accent depending on the company he’s keeping in that moment, and who has a habit of ”hedging conversation round with little anxieties and agonies, so that each time he mentions a fashionable restaurant or good wine or an important friend a solemnity is give to the occasion, as if a flag is planted and unfurled.”
(It’s subtle, isn’t it? That talk of empire, a simple detail, easily overlooked. But military/social hierarchy does play a significant role in this novel, too.)
All three of these descriptions do bring these characters off the page with swift and bold strokes. But there is also an additional significance to each of these passages that is only appreciated after one follows the arc of the novel’s events to their close.
Similarly, there is a delightful sense of bookishness, which one can enjoy wholeheartedly as it unfolds. (The opening of the second chapter is guaranteed to charm the bookish.)
But there are also many allusions that bring another layer of understanding to the story after one has turned the final page and left At Mrs Lippincote’s.
Without spoiling anything, there is a single phrase which alludes to Fatima’s sweet dusty face in Oliver’s storybook, which can be read as yet one more expression of his charming bookishness.
For given that the novel hinges on the question of what makes for a good marriage, it’s not an accident that one of Oliver’s stories is that of Bluebeard and his locked room and an-arguably-disobedient wife (to say nothing of the fact that there is an attic room that is locked in Mrs Lippincote’s house).
“Society necessarily has a great many little rules, especially relating to the behavior of women. One accepted them and life ran smoothly and without embarrassment, or as far as that is possible where there are two sexes. Without the little rules, everything became queer and unsafe.”
At Mrs. Lippincote’s makes for an entertaining and provocative first-reading.
It makes for an impressive and rewarding re-read.
What do you think?
PS Looking for more Elizabeth Taylor bookchat?
The LibraryThing Virago Modern Classics Group
The facebook Virago Modern Classics Readers Group
 Random House, 1991 Hjalmar Söderberg’s Doctor Glas (1905)
Trans. Paul Britten Austin
Intro. Margaret Atwood
Readers are introduced to Doctor Glas via his diary, with his chatter about the weather.
From its opening sentences, you’d never guess at the controversy incited by this novel.
It’s June 12th. There’s been a heat-wave since mid-May. Cool breezes in the evening bring some relief. He runs into neighbours in the street. It’s all very ordinary.
Except that it’s not. Not ordinary, that is.
Even right there, with the talk of the dust and the “veil of red” and the intense heat and discomfort, it’s clear that the doctor’s dislike of the Reverend Gregorius is something remarkable. There, in the second paragraph of his diary.
And, two pages later, there is something unusual about Mrs. Gregorius’ visit to the doctor’s office. She was blushing and stammering and, ultimately, “blurted out something about having a sore throat”, and she was gone.
And, then: ”Why can’t I sleep? After all, I’ve committed no crime.”
That’s what the doctor writes on the next page, amidst meteorological musings.
But why mention it? That he has not committed a crime?
Consider the number of times that you’ve discussed the weather lately (or written about it in your diary). Consider how many times you’ve been tempted to mention that you haven’t committed a crime.
Doctor Glas mentions it for a reason. And that reason spins out through the pages of this slim novel, amidst very ordinary, logical, everyday chatter.
So I take that back. What I said up there. When I said it wasn’t ordinary? What I said before that, about it being ordinary, that’s true. It’s all very ordinary. And that’s what makes it so disturbing.
And that bit? Where one thing is said, and then the opposite is put forth, and then the former statement must be revisited?
That’s the kind of circuitous round-about-ing that the reader experiences in Doctor Glas too.
You see, he performs his duties as a doctor diligently. He espouses adherence to the principles that govern his profession.
But, then: “And duty! An admirable screen to creep behind when we wish to avoid doing what ought to be done.”
And he’s round-about-ing on the matter some more. A good deal more, actually.
And that’s understandable, because the matters that haunt Doctor Glas are complex. And because this is his diary, readers have an inside view.
Readers understand that, even though his actions might not reflect it, he does sympathize with the woman who has had too many children, who comes to him and asks for his help out of another pregnancy. And he does sympathize with the man who wants to end his own suffering.
“There was something beautiful, grand about that cup of poison the Athenians, once believing his life was dangerous to the State, allowed the doctor to administer to Socrates. Our time, if it were to judge him in the same light, would have dragged him up on to a mean scaffold and slaughtered him with an axe.”
These are the kinds of things that keep Doctor Glas up at night.
“Yes, suicide is ugly. But it can be even uglier to go on living. It’s terrible how often one’s only choice is between that which is more or less ugly.”
It’s there: talk of abortion, euthanasia, and murder. It’s all right there, with talk about the weather.
And, in the end, even the details about the weather matter. One has the sense, upon finishing this extraordinarily slim volume, that every word was placed precisely.
That Hjalmar Söderberg was just as exacting a novelist as Doctor Glas was a practitioner.
“Doctor Glas is one of those marvelous books that appears as fresh and vivid now as on the day it was published. [...] It occurs on the cusp of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, but it opens doors the novel has been opening ever since.”
You needn’t take my word for it: take Margaret Atwood’s word for it.
 Last year, I rekindled my affair with the city that I live in. (As other aspects of life got busier, I had started to take it for granted.) But books and exploring? They don’t always mix.
While I was doing a lot of walking and riding and commuting from one side of Toronto to the other last summer and autumn, I was choosing my books based on their size, on how easily they would slip inside a bag or a pocket.*
I’ve got no issue with that, really. Muriel Spark and Penelope Fitzgerald can play defense for the skinny book any day.
But what to do with all the bigger books that kept getting left at home, left on the shelf.
What to say to the bound pages of Robert Bolano and Gregory David Roberts, to those reading friends who have sworn on their merit and nagged me (nicely!) into buying those weighty tomes.
What to do with that idea I’ve had, of re-reading Tolstoy and Elliot, and picking up A Suitable Boy again (hoping, at long last, that I’ve forgotten having been told who the suitable boy is, which was spoiled for me 500-some-odd pages into reading this novel).
Well, here’s one solution. The Chunkster Challenge. Hopefully sharing reading space with other chunky-minded readers will bode well for new reading habits.
But already I have found that my original reading plans with this challenge in mind have ballooned.
Somehow, in making my list, I had overlooked the mass market shelves in my library; I forgot that a seemingly innocuous pocketbook can conceal an incongruous page count.
So what about Marge Piercy’s Gone to Soldiers? And Joyce Carol Oates’ Them? Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man? And Wally Lamb’s I Know This Much Is True?
And what about the Penguin classics nestled in there? The Trollope novels: Can You Forgive Her? The Way We Live Now?
And those fantasy novels that I collected years ago, with the best of intentions? Melanie Rawn’s The Golden Key? Tad Williams’ The Dragonbone Chair? And one which is constantly dangled about these days: G.R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones?
To say nothing of the other novels that I overlooked while making my original list. Because I was in a particular mood that day.
Though I have been in other particular kinds of moods since. Moods which made these books look all-the-more-inviting:
 Image Links to Challenge Page Elizabeth Arthur’s Antarctic Navigation
Ann-Marie MacDonald’s The Way the Crow Flies
Julie Orringer’s The Invisible Bridge
Leslie Marmon Silko’s The Almanac of the Dead
Ann Fairbairn’s Five Smooth Stones
Fanny Burney’s Cecilia
Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables
Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, and
Marguerite Young’s Miss MacIntosh, My Darling
Right now, my big read is Tiina Nunnally’s translation of Sigrid Undset’s trilogy of novels published as Kristin Lavransdatter.
But even though I’m not mathematically inclined, I know that I need to be more than 100 pages into this novel (which does seem to read remarkably quickly) if I am to read more than one book of this size in this reading year.
That doesn’t stop me from making loooong lists of biiiiiig books to read in 2012, in my reading lifetime.
How about you? Are you reading any big books right now? Are you planning to?
Are any of these (or those on my original list) particular favourites of yours?
* And most often it had to share book space with Coach House Press’ Stroll by Shawn Micallef, which is a delightful companion with which to travel.
You’ve probably already seen the list, but have you started to make reading plans?
Here’s the announcement (it’s bookishly funny) and then you can buy the books at a discount from Powell’s (because who can resist shopping indie, let alone at a discount).
 Patrick deWitt, The Sisters Brothers
Chad Harbach, The Art of Fielding
Téa Obreht, The Tiger’s Wife
Michael Ondaatje, The Cat’s Table
Karen Russell, Swamplandia!
Nathacha Appanah, The Last Brother
Donald Ray Pollock, Devil All the Time
Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending
Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot
Alan Hollinghurst, Stranger’s Child
Ann Patchett, State of Wonder
Haruki Murakami, 1Q84
Teju Cole, Open City
Helen DeWitt, Lightning Rods
Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones
Kate Zambreno, Green Girl
I’m new to this, but I happen to have read 5 of the 16 books already.
Whether I get much further, I’m not sure, but I have The Last Brother sitting here (mainly because Graywolf publishes such awesome books).
Do you follow TMN Tournament? What have you read?
What would you recommend? Which intrigue you?
 Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo’s Roseanna (1967)
Trans. Lois Roth Intro. Henning Mankell (2006)
In the first book group I ever joined, all the women were abuzz with talk of this mystery series. I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to be officially introduced to Martin Beck.
In turn, it takes a loooong time for Martin Beck to be officially introduced to the victim in the first novel of this classic series.
Simply identifying her, after her body is fished out of Swedish waters, is a monumental task.
“Eighty-five people, one of whom was presumably guilty, and the rest of whom were possible witnesses, each had their small pieces that might fit into the great jig-saw puzzle. Eighty-five people, spread over four different continents. Just to locate them was a Herculean task.”
Indeed, much of this book is about the frustration and lack of progress in this case. And the reader is dragged along throughout the process, often even reading long transcripts only to be reminded of all that is not known, not understood.
Beck is aware that this could be the case that haunts him for the rest of his days, not just for the rest of his career, but for the rest of his life.
“He remembered so well that man had sat month after month, year after year, in his office late into the night, going through all the papers and rechecking the testimony for the five hundredth, or possibly the thousandth time.”
Because it’s not like Martin, either, can leave the case behind. Every aspect of his being is absorbed by it. And the only thing more absorbing than solving it is the sense that he’s not solving it. He finds it increasingly difficult to carry on even the impression of having anything like a “normal” life.
“Martin Beck slept on the train. He didn’t wake up before it arrived in Stockholm. He really only woke up when he got into his own bed at home.”
He’s not sleeping, not eating (hardly at all, and poorly even then), not explaining to his wife, not spending time with his kids, not doing anything else at all, actually.
“‘Christmas presents. I had completely forgotten.’
‘Me too,’ said Martin Beck. ‘That is to say I think of it from time to time but that’s all that ever gets done about it.’”
And naturally this takes a toll on those who surround him, primarily upon his wife.
“She had given up faith in this project a long time ago. It had not produced results and kept him away from home night after night. And he neither could nor would explain.”
She feels very much a character of the ’60s, which is appropriate, given this volume’s 1965 publication date; she is a woman who is showing her independence in some ways and still content to settle into a more traditional role when it suits her.
For me, her character had the smooth, expected contours of a familiar type, but, to be fair, this is not a role which affords her much dimensional presence. Roseanne is Beck’s story.
His wife is not a whole person to his thinking (likely because his focus on his work does not allow anyone close to him to take on a whole persona) and she does not appear so on the page either. What detective’s wife does exist on her own terms?
Which brings me, however, to talk of Mankell and Larsson; if you’ve read works of theirs, it’s quite fascinating to see the overlap and divergence between the opening of this classic series and the fiercely popular contemporary detectives’ work (even specific cases and clues).
* * *
 Charlaine Harris’ Sookie Stackhouse Mysteries
#1-4 Dead Until Dark; Living Dead in Dallas;
Club Dead; Dead to the World
Although this is one of those rare instances in which I enjoy the film version of the novel(s) more than the text narrative, I have had fun with these four novels.
I read them with that strange — and inherently satisfying — mix of the familiar and the new that comes with a series, at a time when that’s exactly what I wanted from my reading. You know what I mean?
Mind you, Sookie is not a character with whom I’d have much in common, were we to meet off the page.
And, because she has the uncanny ability to understand people’s thoughts as they’re having them, she would likely pick up pretty quickly on my feeling uneasy around her.
But it’s not that I don’t like her; it’s just that I don’t find her credible.
At times, in my opinion, she is clever, just the kind of clever that she needs to be, in order to advance the plot; at other times, she is not-so-clever, just the kind of not-so-clever that she needs to be, in order to advance the plot.
At first, I thought maybe I was reacting to the fact that she doesn’t always make rational decisions. That as a character, she’s all-over-the-place because of the circumstances in her life.
The first four books of the series pivot around the push/pull that Sookie feels to/from Bill and Eric, each of whom is, at various points, overwhelmingly repulsive and exceedingly attractive to her. (See how I’m avoiding all the spoilery stuff?!)
So it’s quite possible — and believable, to my mind — that she isn’t always making choices that are thoughtful, practical or consistent.
How can she be consistent, when she’s in flux, right? And not just about her love life, but about her friendships, her work, the responsibility of her “gift”/”curse”, and the losses that she has had to deal with (her parents died when she was young, for instance).
But but but. That doesn’t explain it for me;.
I can appreciate inconsistency in a character, when I wholly believe in a character, but I never completely believe in Sookie, so I am constantly floating atop my awareness that this is a tale being spun for me, and I never truly sink into the telling of it.
Still, Sookie’s character as envisioned by Alan Ball and portrayed by Anna Paquin, fleshes out the character in Charlaine Harris’ novels for me well enough to find the stories entertaining. Maybe I do stay on the surface of it all, and maybe that’s okay.
Besides, sometimes only a series will do. In those reading moods, even the repetitive elements work for me.
I don’t mind that, in the first book, Sookie says “I’m blond and blue-eyed and twenty-five, and my legs are strong and my bosom is substantial, and I have a waspy waistline”. And, in the next, she says “I look exactly like the girl you’d see in a low-paying job any place in any town in the South: blond and bosomy and tan and young”.
In these two books, she’s wearing her summer wardrobe for her waitressing job. In Dead Until Dark, she’s wearing Nikes; in Living Dead in Dallas, she’s got a pair of Adidas. In Club Dead, she’s shifted into her winter duds: “black slacks with white boat-neck long-sleeved tee with ‘Merlotte’s’ embroidered over the left breast”. By the time I get to the third book, I’m adding the “bosomy” bits myself.
And how can I not giggle when, in the first book, Bill’s mouth is compared to a prince’s on a Byzantine mosaic and, in the second, it’s compared to a Greek statue, so that by the time I get to the third, and his skin glows, his hair is thick and dark and smells like Herbal Essence, and he has a wonderful back with broad shoulders, I’ve got the classic profile solidly lodged in my reader’s brain.
I’m not entirely sure that I am meant to giggle at these things, but I love a good excuse to giggle. (And, frankly, I think I could use more giggle-worthy books.) And there are certainly times when I know that I *am* meant to, so it seems fair enough to extend the invitation.
“’Well, hel-lo, tall, blond, and dead,’ Claudine said. She looked Eric up and down, admiring what she saw. ‘You in the habit of doing what human women ask of you?’”
Sure, the tension in the series is maintained by the Bill-Eric drama (and, to a lesser extent, Sookie’s involvement with her boss, Sam, who has a secret of his own that is revealed near the end of the first novel).
Which fella is sitting up front with Sookie, which one is riding in the back seat, and which one is riding in the back of the pick-up truck: that’s the overarching storyline designed to pull readers through the series.
And it doesn’t have to be more complicated than that. Sookie knows that.
“I read a lot. School was tough for me with my little problem, but reading by myself gave me a means of escape from my situation.”
Maybe Sookie does read a lot. Maybe we just don’t read the same things. And that’s okay with me. We don’t need to be BFFs; we can just meet on the page when I’m in the mood for a good giggle.
* * *
 Chris Roberson and Michael Affred’s
iZombie: Dead to the World
NY: DC Comics, 2011.
“My name is Gwen Dylan, and I’m not the girl I used to be.”
That’s how it starts. And it’s true.
Also, her friend Ellie is a ghost, and her friend Spot, er, Scott, is a were terrier, which means he’s “full-moon cuteness rather than terror-filled”.
And that description of Scott could give you the sense that iZombie reads kind of like a cross between Archie comics and Robert Kirkman’s “The Walking Dead”.
Which is also true. And which is to say that it’s a lot of fun.
The dialogue is pretty realistic. And that won’t be to everyone’s taste.
“I just…um…hi.”
“Hi yourself.”
And the story is not complex or multi-layered, but it’s solidly entertaining, and Gwen remains at the heart of the narrative.
You can have a peek at the palette above, and the flavour of the drawing style. In the back of volume one, there’s also an intriguing set of images, including a pencil sketch of the cover of the fourth issue, and other proposed covers that haven’t been used (yet, or ever).
All of this adds another dimension to the reading experience and echoes the story’s theme: “Still, not everything buried remains lost and forgotten…”
Technically speaking, this volume contains issues one through five, and The House of Mystery Hallowe’en Annual; I won’t be standing outside the comic store waiting for the next single issue, but I’ll happily read it when it’s bound and looking for feeders, er, readers.
* * *
 Gail Carriger’s Soulless (2009)
You’ve seen the cover a hundred times, right? You’ve heard almost as many readers insist that it’s unmissable?
But maybe you haven’t yet taken the plunge into steampunk? Maybe you’re a little uncomfortable with the idea.
Alexia Tarrabotti could relate, in some ways.
“She was quite uncomfortable, for corsets, bustles, and all other accoutrements of a lady’s appropriate dress were not conducive to lying, bound, on a hard floor.”
This is a tiny spoiler, I suppose: now you know that she is going to be bound on a floor somewhere.
But, really, within the first two pages of the novel, you know that Alexia is a firebrand.
“She shifted, sighed, and stared up at the ceiling, trying to think about anything but [deleted plot point], or [other deleted plot point]. Which meant she could do nothing but reflect on the complex plight of her mama’s most recent embroidery project. This, in itself, was a worse torture than any her captors could devise.”
She’s spunky. She has a kick-ass umbrella. She’s sassy. She’s not interested in embroidery. She’s someone that I would have loved to have met when I was a teenager. And she’s someone that I’m happy to know as a grown-up reader, too.
Soulless was my Can’t-Sleep-Read-Under-the-Covers book and I’m pretty sure it was much more useful for keeping me awake than for helping me settle back to sleep.
***
So, yeah. I’m supposed to be finishing series. At least catching up with them.
Go ahead. Ask me what I’m doing with these little lovelies. It makes no sense, I know.
Or you could tell me how many series you’re reading in right now.
Pick a number. If it’s got three digits in it, I might feel better.
 I borrowed books in this series repeatedly as a girl. I knew exactly which shelves they were on.
If that old library was still operational, I think I could find them in an instant.
What I wasn’t so sure of, was whether I would enjoy the stories as much as an adult.
Monica Dickens’ World’s End series was just as enjoyable this time around.
There is something timeless about the way in which the Fielding family makes a home for themselves at World’s End.
It’s really rather a gentle series, but it begins with a house-fire.
“After the fire, after they had stood on the potato patch in the rain and watched the firemen finish off with axes and hoses the bits of their home that the flames had not destroyed, the Fielding children had been taken to Uncle Rudolf’s house in London.”
This is how it happens. Because there has to be circumstances in which the children had to take on the responsibility of making a home for themselves, and for their parents, at World’s End.
“Tom was not a child. The others, Carrie, Em and Michael, did not feel like children that night. They had stood shivering in the mud, with the dog and the cats, and the fish and the box of the hibernating turtle. And nobody else. Their mother had been taken away to hospital in the ambulance, because a falling beam had broken her back. Their father was sailing around the world in a homemade boat. They did not know how far he had got. He had not come home in nearly a year. Now there was no home for him to come to.”
Tom, Carrie, Em, and Michael are not of an age to be living independently, but while their mother is recovering in the hospital, and because their father is away, they are stuck with Uncle Rudolf and Aunt Valentina.
These two, deliberately childless, go half-bonkers with the children, who are going half-bonkers living with these two.
When a client gives Uncle Rodolf the old World’s End inn as part of a payment for his services, the couple is relieved to help the children move in after the summer term is over.
 “Uncle Rudolf bought them sleeping-bags and tin mugs and plates and an iron kettle and cooking pot, since at first it would be more like camping out than living in a house. Aunt Val gave them fly spray and a half-gallon bottle of Milk of Magnesia, and a lot of advice about wet feet and not letting a dog lick your face.
Nobody listened. They were not listening to any voice from the past. They had their ears pricked forward to the new adventure ahead.”
Wasn’t that just the best kind of adventure? The one ahead.
And the one without parental supervisions. These were my favourite stories.
“The end of the world… Coming out of the wood into sudden sunlight, the old road took a turn round an overgrown hedge full of wild roses, and there it was.
It was a stone house with a tiled roof dipping in the middle and curling at the edges. It was very shabby, with damp green patches on the walls, broken windows, and rooks flying out of the chimneys. The path to the door was made of great flat millstones, grown over with grass and weeds, with half a millstone for the doorstep.”
World’s End was not an instant home for the children, but it was an instant refuge. After the first night, they immediately began to settle in, and the adventures weren’t long in coming.
The first is a mission to rescue a horse that is being mistreated by a man in the neighbourhood. You might think that Tom, being the eldest, would be leading this venture, but he is looking for work.
Instead, it’s Carrie — and eventually, Michael, the youngest — who carry out this plan. And it’s significant for setting the tone of the series.
For World’s End is not only a refuge for these four children, but for many four-legged creatures who need a haven as well. By the beginning of the second volume, there are 110 legs standing (or curled up) at World’s End.
 All the creatures that had been standing outside watching their home build at the beginning of the first volume are still there, and many more besides.
Minor characters include Lester, whose mother occasionally fills in when someone parent-y is required. He is a spirited young fellow. “With Lester, you were always aware of living an adventure while it was going on.” (Winter)
He respects and protects all creatures, whereas some of the children overlook, say, the eight-legged. (I might have guessed that to be Lester alongside, on this cover image, but he is described as having darker skin, so I think the artist means this to be Michael.)
And Lester’s mother, Mrs. Figg, works at a girls’ home locally, Mount Pleasant.
Which is how the children meet Liza, who was a resident there for a time, and who offers, at an opportune moment, to hold the bridle of Carrie’s horse, and eventually gets to know the children on her own terms.
She and her mother, Mrs. Zlotkin, come into the story in the summer, along with four-legged Dusty, who was badly treated while Liza was away, who finds, like many others, refuge at World’s End, for a time.
There are many recurring characters who share the Fieldings’ love of and respect for the four-legged:
* Mr. Mismo, who knows something about living on a farm, and his wife, who bakes biscuits and bread
* Alec Harvey, the local vet, who necessarily gets to know the children rather well (He is “as poor as they were, since he was always treating animals free for people who were even poorer”.)
* Jan Lynch, whose animal expertise lies in another direction (She looks after the zoo animals and she and Alec work together as required.)
* Miss Etty, whose bungalow is built around a tree and houses her birds (She says: “There’s some people hear ghosts…and some that don’t.” And she is of the former sort.)
and
* The Agnews, who have moved into the big red brick house on the edge of the village for the winter, with their two perfect (meaning, perfectly annoying ) children, Victor and Jane, and their other child, Priscilla (who is damaged somehow)
 But the most significant characters in these stories are the four-legged ones. They are often as engaged in the story as the children.
Carrie explains: “You can’t own an animal, you see, any more than you can own a human being, since the days of slavery. An animal may live with you, but — well, it’s like if you call a person ‘my friend’, it doesn’t mean you own them….” (Winter)
This is the spirit of the story that I responded to so wholly and completely as a young reader, and it remains intact. This idea has remained integral to my way of engaging with the world ever since. (Well, it took me some years to adopt Lester’s protective efforts on behalf of the eight-legged, but I got there.)
This element of the narrative makes it stand out in my reader’s mind, but there was many other aspects of it which were more familiar and cozy, typical of the kinds of innocent English tales that I read as a girl.
For instance, Christmas comes around in World’s End in Winter. “The tree at World’s End was a small scrub pine dug out of the back of the hill, and decorated with strings of popcorn and nuts, painted fir cones, and real candles fixed on with clothes pegs.” The grown-ups drink eggnog with rum and nutmeg and the children play games.
It’s still all very simple, at Christmas and otherwise.
And it must be, because most of the year everyone at World’s End is “rubbing along somehow without grown-ups or ever enough money or food; but with horses, cats, dogs, a goat and a sheep, chickens, ducks, rabbits, a donkey, a guineapig, and wild mice in the feed shed who made jokes about the cats.” (Spring)
But it’s the four-legged that make this series resonate so strongly with me. And all the animals are loved, but Carrie’s relationship with horses, and particularly John, is especially touching: “While John browsed on the hedge, Carrie lay on his neck like a drowned corpse, arms and legs hanging, her face buried in his aromatic mane.”
Are there books that you read, in childhood, which resonated with you so strongly that you know they are somehow at the root of “who you are” today?
 Striking cover, no? Alice Sebold’s novel was longlisted for the Orange Prize in 2003, the year that Valerie Martin’s Property won the prize.
A friend of mine was so excited about The Lovely Bones, that she bought it as soon as it was available in paperback, and I’ve had my copy ever since.
Because as much as she’d wanted to read it, almost as soon as she started, she wanted it out of her sight immediately and lastingly.
The Lovely Bones has that potential to divide readers, boldly and unequivocally.
It’s not the style, not the voice, not the language, not the setting; it’s the novel’s very premise that will either draw you in or push you away.
Here’s how that happens.
“‘How to Commit the Perfect Murder’ was an old game in heaven. I always chose the icicle: the weapon melts away.”
That’s Susie Salmon, the narrator of Sebold’s debut. She is 14 years old. Forever. Because she was murdered on January 6, 1973.
Readers only know her, in fact, after she has died. In the first few pages of our acquaintance, she recounts the horrifying events that led to her death. It is the stuff of nightmares.
And, yes, in the second chapter, we see Susie’s heaven. We meet her friends there, her case worker; we see the games that she likes to play there.
Because there isn’t a lot for Susie to do up there. So of course she spends a lot of time thinking about murder and death and loss.
But mostly what readers see, through Susie’s eyes, is what she has left behind. She is always thinking and always watching her friends and family, those who continue to live on Earth.
So it’s not an uplifting tale. It’s narrated by a dead girl, and it revolves around what she has lost and how others are dealing with her loss, their loss.
 Image Links to Jill's Site Many readers will be put off by that immediately. Many others will be put off by the extended meditation on grief.
Each of the characters responds differently. And those responses change, too, as time passes, while Susie is still watching.
Here’s one survivor: ”He had been keeping, daily, weekly, yearly, an underground storage room of hate.” (269)
And another: “…she had often felt since — that I was with her somehow, in her thoughts and limbs — moving with her like a twin.” (237)
And yet another: ”Like someone who has survived a gut-shot, the wound had been closing, closing — braiding into a scar for eight long years.” (242)
I don’t want to identify these individuals because it some ways it’s unexpected, the ways in which members of Susie’s community respond.
But it is true that the expanse of the cast in itself may also divide readers.
The Lovely Bones considers all the main players in this drama, but also boyfriends, neighbours and extended family,a detective, a nurse…and a murderer.
Whether you are drawn in, or pushed back, The Lovely Bones is an uncomfortable — but also, if you can persist with the premise, compelling — story.
In the end (whatever ‘end’ means), it seems that the heart of the novel resides in this belief which one of the characters holds as fundamentally true:
“…the dead truly talk to us, that in the air between the living, spirits bob and weave and laugh with us. They are the oxygen we breathe.”
I enjoyed some of the story’s symbolism (the motif of the house, the idea of structure, what is enclosed and what expands beyond borders), the concept of other-worldliness, and I really did want to see how things turned out for these characters.
 What's next for me in Orange January? Like the reviewer for the Sunday Telegraph wrote (Maggie O’Farrell: “…hours later, I was still there, book in hand, transfixed”), I did find it every engaging and the pages nearly turned themselves.
For my reading taste, however, I would have appreciated a more complex structure, or a stronger sense of place. A narrative like Suzette Mayr’s Monoceros — which considers some similar themes — has an additional layer of sophistication in the storytelling, and that, with the wide range of various characters’ responses to their grief in that novel, substantially deepened my reading experience of that story of loss.
Companion Reads:
Alexi Zentner’s Touch (2011), a beautiful and haunting tale of discovery and loss and magic
Myla Goldberg’s Bee Season (2000), for a different take on a family’s unraveling
Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach (1999), another exploration of loss, on the land of the Haisla
Note: Here’s a link to the LibraryThing Group for Orange January/July, the Facebook group, and to my way-too-obsessive debate with myself about what to read this month!
 Image Comics 2010 I first made the acquaintance of the series during my first Dewey’s Read-a-Thon, when I was looking for graphic novels to entertain Mr. BIP; we’ve both become completely hooked.
I was struck by the comments in the introduction, including this one: “This is a very character driven endeavor. How these characters get there is much more important than them getting there.”
At the heart of that is Rick, of course. Through the last twelve volumes of the series, Rick’s been through a lot.
Well, it’s a series about zombies. You can imagine.
Volume 13: Too Far Gone
In this volume, his character continues to develop. “We’re going to follow the rules, make this work. This is just in case things get ugly.”
Well, it’s a series about zombies. Of course things get ugly.
Circumstances have changed, but Rick’s still at the head of the non-zombie pack.
“I have to make things WORK here. I have to be ready for anything…I have to think three steps ahead of everyone.”
But it’s not simple.
“I’m just doing what need to be done. You can’t see that?”
But it’s just not simple.
That’s why there are three identically drawn panels in this volume: Rick lying face down on his bed.
Volume 14: No Way Out
 Image Comics 2011 In this volume, readers are pulled through the whole “has to get worse before it gets better” scenario.
I know what you’re thinking: there are zombies everywhere, so how can it get worse.
The nature of the situation is that there is always a weakness. Things are never as secure as one would hope.
At first it seems only challenging.
“We’ll give it a day or two and then we’ll probably have to do this again. It’s not going to be an easy week or so coming up…but, as long as we stay on top of it, should be manageable.”
But challenging quickly devolves into chaotic and, then, overwhelming.
There is a really great double-page spread in which there are eight long top-to-bottom panels, only an inch wide; each gives a glimpse of the way in which some of the main characters are facing what’s ahead.
I found myself wondering, in the fourteenth volume of the series, if there will ever be an end to the fighting. It’s not that the tales have lost any of their momentum, I just wonder.
And I know that’s what I’m supposed to be wondering. These characters (the few who have been around since the first volume) are wondering exactly the same thing.
But the storyteller is at work. There is an arc to this volume. It’s just that you can’t see it while you’re in the middle of everything. And that, too, is just as it should be.
How about you: are you hooked?
 Shaun Tan’s The Arrival
Arthur A. Levine Books – Scholastic Books, 2006
The wordless images in The Arrival are often breath-taking, sometimes sad and always evocative. (You can see one of them here, on the author’s page.)
Tan says: “I see each book as an experiment in visual and written narrative, part of an ongoing exploration of this fascinating literary form.
The tale begins with the departure, a man on a journey, leaving loved ones behind.
At times it seems like something that a child could comfortably read.
At other times it seems to deal with themes that are too intricate for a child to absorb.
It is not a linear narrative; it reads like a mediation on exile, escape, identity, family, threat, fear, alienation, attack, vulnerability and security.
The sources of photographs that inspired the storyteller give a clue to the breadth of the story: an image of Ellis Island, one of a newsboy announcing the sinking of the Titanic, picture postcards of NY from the turn of the century, and photographs of street scenes from post-war Europe.
It has the feel of a tale that would one could revisit periodically and always take something new away from the reading of it.
 Robert Sikoryak’s Masterpiece Comics
Drawn and Quarterly, 2009
From the moment that I spotted its larger-than-life cover, with the advertisement banner at the bottom that read “Coming soon: Virgil! Chaucer! Flaubert! And more! Watch for them at your newsstand or local library!”…I was all-a-chuckle.
The tales that are included are tales that most readers know, but not as they are presented by Robert Sikoryak.
They stretch back to the myth of Adam and Eve, only it appears here as Blond Eve. You’ll recognize the inspiration to be the cartoonish Chic Young, 1930s, comic-strip, featuring Blondie and Dagwood, the “housewife with golden curls and her tired-out husband”.
In discussing his work on this short narrative, Sikoryak states that in these Judeo-Christian scripture stories, characters juggle free will and duties to the creator like the “modern day harried husband conveys sandwich ingredients to his kitchen table”.
So, Blondie was the perfect casting choice. Obviously.
But what about “The Crypt of Brontë”?
Here the 1950s graphic horror narratives of Al Feldstein and Jack Davis inspired the retelling of the 1847 Gothic-inspired novel.
As Sikoryak says, these ”gruesome morality tales” emphasized wickedness (even when thwarted) over goodness (which was considered tedious).
All these delicious stories are told in 8 pages or less (there are many, many more), but the advertisements and supporting images are just as much fun.
I used to daydream about the possibilities of buying the Sea Monkeys advertised on the backs of my comic books when I was a girl, but if I only had known to daydream about collecting the entire series of Action Camus.
And then there is the ad-Pequod whaling ship featured in its full-page ad; it seats 1 kid and 1 cannibal and features harpoons that shoot (you can send payments by post but NY state residents must add 14 cent whaling tax).
 Audrey Niffenegger’s The Night Bookmobile
AbramsComics, 2010
I waited for months to borrow a copy of this from the library.
Not because there was so much demand, but because they took their sweet time ordering it for their collection (ironically).
And now I feel a little silly for having waited because this is a keeper; now I wish that I had simply bought my own copy the first time that someone recommended it.
As for real-life bookmobiles, I was only in one a couple of times as a girl, but I thought they were the best thing ever.
“The night bookmobile seemed larger from the inside – much larger. The lighting was subdued but pleasant. The whole place smelled of old, dry paper, with a little whiff of wet dog, which I like.”
My memories of the actual bookmobile were that it was actually smaller in there than it looked but, when it comes to other libraries, I agree that inside they do seem bigger.
Anyway, Alexandra’s bookmobile is hers. It’s personal. She finds all her favourite books in there. They all hold memories for her.
“My childhood: hours spent in airless classrooms, days home sick from school reading Nancy Drew, forbidden books read secretively late at night. Teenage years reading – trying to read – books I’d heard were important, Naked Lunch and The Fountainhead, Ulysses and Women in Love…”
The artwork is quite wonderful. Sometimes the perspective leaves the viewer with a very simple image, Alexandra and the Wiinebago in the night. Sometimes it is a very detailed close-up, with individual spines legible.
Things are not always neat and tidy and bordered. The stairs of the Winnebago might cut into the top corner of the neighbouring panel. A hand might extend from one panel outward to the reader, eclipsing part of a panel beneath.
Sometimes the narrative is incorporated into the image, sometimes it is set apart in an adjacent panel. The dialogue is hand-written and looks to be written with a stubby primer-school pencil.
It always has the feel of a story being told. It often has the feel of a story that I already know.
“I drank my tea and explored the farthest recesses of my collection. Each spine was an encapsulated memory, each book represented hours, days of pleasure, of immersion in words.”
Well you know how that is, don’t you.
Have you read any of these? Do you have other graphic works on your stack these days?
 The Kurt Wallander series was one of the first of the Scandinavian mystery series to cause a buzz in North America, but I was frustrated by the fact that the earliest volumes weren’t translated into English as quickly as I wanted them.
You see, I’m obsessive about reading mystery series in order, which can traced back to a traumatic experience surrounding my reading of Kinsey Millhone’s ‘E’ and “C” before “A” many years ago (in Sue Grafton’s series).
It wasn’t until I heard the World Book Club’s podcast about Faceless Killers (the first novel in the series) that I realized that I was free to read at last.
In fact The Pyramid was translated into English (by Ebba Segerberg and Laurie Thompson) and published in 2008. I am definitely late to the Henning Mankell party.
He realized after writing Sidetracked, the fifth volume in the Kurt Wallander series, that he had started to write, in his head, stories that predated the series.
Readers, too, were curious about this character’s life “before” and eventually two of these were published in newspapers and the other two and The Pyramid appeared in this volume for the first time.
Had I not heard the interview with the author, I’m not sure that I would have enjoyed these stories as much. The interview was entirely based around the first novel, not this book, but Henning Mankell’s diction and self-expression has an abruptness to it that is mirrored in his writing style.
The prose is certainly bare-bones and matter-of-fact. And in combination with Wallander’s cyclical frustration with the various relationships in this life, I might have set the series aside.
(Which isn’t to say that I’m not sympathetic to his frustrations with his aging father, with his disappointing romantic life, with his difficulty keeping in contact with his young adult daughter.)
But in person Mankell’s humour comes across, and he is obviously fond of Wallander, for all his flaws; I can hear his voice when I am reading, and it definitely adds a level of enjoyment that I’d not have had otherwise.
It’s also an advantage to know, from the start, that he discovered a subtitle for the series after he had finished writing it: “Novels about the Swedish Anxiety”.
What is happening to the Sweden that Wallander thought he knew?
“And what is Swedish, exactly?” Rydberg asked. “There are no longer any borders. Not for airplanes nor serious criminals. Once Ystad lay at the outskirts of something. What happened in Stockholm did not happen here. Not even things that occurred in Malmö were typical in a small town like Ystad. But that time is over.”
This thread runs through all these stories, Wallander’s sense that the Sweden he thought he knew has changed dramatically.
 Random House edition, 2003 Faceless Killers is the first Kurt Wallander mystery proper. If you are completely and entirely obsessive about reading stories chronologically, then you, too, will begin with The Pyramid, the last story of which, the title story, brings the reader to Faceless Killers.
Still fresh from the separation with Mona, our hero is adjusting to life as a single man with difficulty. Which might strike one as funny because neither Mona nor Linda, his teenage daughter, made more than fleeting appearances in the earlier stories either. (So I don’t count this revelation as a spoiler.)
It’s not that he is intentionally unkind; he is preoccupied with his life as a policeman. So the fleeting references to Mona and Linda are really the same, regretful glimpses.
And these regrets are intensifed by his growing awareness of his father’s descent, not only into old age, but a cloying loneliness that is accompanied by increasingly frequent exhibitions of dementia. He finally involves his sister, Kristina, with whom he no longer shares a close relationship either.
“Wallander could see that his sister was shocked at their father’s decline. Together they cleaned out the stinking rubbish and filthy clothes. ‘How could this happen?’ she asked, and Wallander felt that she was blaming him.” (210)
But Wallander’s father is not an easy man to deal with. When asked by a reader in the World Book Club podcast about this novel (come on, it’s been days since I raved about the WBC), Henning Mankell states that he deliberately gave Wallander this problem. He wanted him to have something to wrestle with.
Wallander’s father represents a fear of change. Even at a tangible level, he is most comfortable with the familiar. He is a painter, one who earns decent money from his work, but he repeatedly paints a rural scene; down to the colour of sky it’s the same every time, with the only possible variation being whether or not a grouse appears in the bottom left corner.
And Wallander, in turn, is forced to deal with change. He’s still anxious about the ways in which it seems Sweden is changing. And if it is these concerns which drive his decision to pursue policework, it is no wonder that he cannot leave it behind at the end of the day (either his job, or his anxiety).
Nonetheless, his skills are developing, and there is quite a trajectory between the first story in The Pyramid and this novel. Wallander is becoming a professional.
“He knew that he’d done a good job. He had trusted his intuition, acted without hesitation, and it had produced results. The thought of the crazy…[snipped bits of plot] gave him the shakes. But the relief was still there.” (212)
As for the cases in this volume, there are two, interfolded. The first is one which makes for a strong narrative because it is such a frightening concept, a seemingly unanswerable crime.
The second is one which is equally chilling because its root is in the fear of change, something inherently human, which is very much an element of this series’ characters, but here with devastating consequences that erupt from a mindset which has taken this fear to an extreme.
But as is often the case, I don’t think readers come here just for the mystery; it’s because of Kurt Wallander.
In that interview I keep mentioning, Henning Mankell states that he regularly has women ask him to tell Wallander about them, as though hopeful that a match will be made.
I would not be one of those women, but I do think there is a match to be made between me and this series of novels. (Are you one of those women?)
Had I not heard the author’s interview, I’m not sure I would have been so engaged (the style is a bit nuts-and-bolts-ish, but it reflects the author’s delivery). But, as it is, I am keen to readThe Dogs of Riga.
And apparently a lot of other people are too, as I plucked book one from the library shelves, but there is a hold list for book two. For a novel in translation, by Steven T. Murray, originally published in 1991 (published in 1997 in English), that’s quite something.
What do you think is the charm of this series? Do you follow along?
Or has another Swedish crime-fighter captured your reader’s attentions?
|
|
