Skip to content

Recent Posts

  • Best review yet of You Knew He Had Kids
  • Frequently Asked Questions about Society of Stepmothers
  • Random Facts about The Evil Sweater and Other Stories
  • Free recipe: Chocolate Raspberry Croissant
  • Free recipe: Simple Mint

Most Used Categories

  • Reviews (61)
    • Fiction (41)
    • Bestsellers (40)
    • Nonfiction (17)
    • No-Spoiler Book Reviews (13)
    • Audiobooks (5)
    • A Book from Every Country (5)
  • My Books (21)
    • Why We Read What We Read (15)
  • News & Blabber (5)
Skip to content
  • Online Courses
  • Contact
Author, Writer, and Editor Lisa Adams | 'Society of Stepmothers,' 'S'mores: Gourmet Treats for Every Occasion,' 'Feshy's Dreamworld,' 'The Evil Sweater and Other Stories,' and 'Why We Read What We Read,'

Author, Writer, and Editor Lisa Adams | 'Society of Stepmothers,' 'S'mores: Gourmet Treats for Every Occasion,' 'Feshy's Dreamworld,' 'The Evil Sweater and Other Stories,' and 'Why We Read What We Read,'

  • S’mores
  • Society of Stepmothers
  • Evil Sweater
  • Feshy’s Dreamworld
  • Why We Read What We Read
  • Home
  • Reviews
  • Page 2

Category: Reviews

I started writing book reviews around the time that Why We Read What We Read was published, mostly as a way to keep up on the latest bestsellers. Most of the reviews below appeared on the Why We Read blog. Then THIS web site ate the blog, and now the reviews live here. So if you feel like pretending to care what I think about books, this is totally the place to be!

(I know I haven’t written any for a while. But shit people, give me a break! We’re all busy!)

 

Posts

Chick Lit, here I come

LisaMay 4, 2008May 29, 2014

It’s been suggested by some readers here that I look into the chick lit phenomenon, a genre we skipped in Why We Read What We Read because it simply isn’t bestselling—at least not bestselling enough to thrust a title into the top 15 for any one year. Still, one really can’t ignore the hot pink drawings gracing innumerable slim paperbacks at one’s local bookstore. These titles occupy premium display space at the chain stores, proof enough that they are selling in very satisfying quantities indeed.

As a clueless outsider, I wasn’t sure even what “chick lit” really was. After all, 70% of literary fiction is read by women, and with even autobiographical journeys like Eat, Pray, Love scoring big with the ladies, it wasn’t clear to me that all of those offerings didn’t qualify. However, according to the book reviewers over at ChickLitBooks.com, chick lit is women’s fiction of a very special type:

It’s all in the tone. Chick lit is told in a more confiding, personal tone. It’s like having a best friend tell you about her life….Humor is a strong point in chick lit, too….THAT is what really separates chick lit from regular women’s fiction.

Got it. Less Maya Angelou, more Bridget Jones.

I also learned that chick lit, like romantic fiction, comes in multiple sub-genres. You’ve got City Girl Lit, and Wedding Lit, and Hen Lit (for “older” women in their 30s to 60s). You’ve got Christian Lit, “Bigger Girl” Lit, even “Lad Lit” that’s written by and about men (but in that all-important light and humorous tone).

I started with Mom Lit. It seemed like it would be different from The Nanny Diaries (which I did read once) and Sex and the City (which I still watch a lot) without veering too far into one of the more peculiar branches of the genre.

And I started with a powerhouse: Jennifer Weiner. Though chick lit hasn’t broken through to an annual list’s top 15, Weiner is still a bestselling author who sold nearly 300,000 copies of The Guy Not Taken in 2007. That’s not the book I read, though. I picked up Little Earthquakes, a story about women who meet in a prenatal yoga class and become friends, supporting each other through their trials with their husbands and new babies.

Well, I wasn’t very impressed. I just felt so neutral about this book: it wasn’t horribly boring, but it wasn’t terribly interesting. And, disappointingly, despite the promises of ChickLitBooks.com, it just wasn’t that funny. It was light, certainly, and it had scenes that I know were supposed to be funny, but the only thing that I thought was genuinely amusing was when the women took turns tossing yarmulkes across the room at their babies’ bare heads.

Of course, a book needn’t be funny if it has depth, but I thought Little Earthquakes was lacking in that department as well. It wasn’t really about anything—except that caring for an infant is really, really hard. That’s all true, and I can see the book being comforting to overworked new moms (if they would even have time to read it), but I just needed more.

Halfway through, in fact, I needed so much more that I swapped Little Earthquakes for Tom Perrotta’s Little Children. Both the titular and thematic similarities were coincidental, but the comparison well demonstrated what I want from a novel that my foray into chick lit just wasn’t delivering.

Themes. Themes! Themes!! I like my books to be about something bigger, to comment upon the human condition, to explore our tweaked-out selves in some thoughtful way. It’s not a matter of topic: like Weiner, Perrotta writes about parents, children, marriage, and suburban life. But he does it in a way that’s so much less shallow, so much less predictable, and just—honestly—so much better.

His story follows a number of befuddled characters: a stay-at-home mom who can’t quite figure how she ever ended up married with a child; a hot stay-at-home dad who sneaks out at night to watch skateboarders instead of studying for the bar exam he’s failed twice; an angry retired cop with an agenda; a panty-sniffer; and yes, even a child molester. Perhaps these dark edges give Perrotta an immediate literary advantage. But either way, he works his theme both literally and figuratively: the characters are linked by the “little children” around which their lives revolve, while also becoming helpless “little children” themselves in the face of their own desires.

After finishing Little Children, I did eventually get to the embarrassingly shallow ending of Little Earthquakes, in which all is magically resolved. What’s so strange to me is that Weiner goes out of her way to crystallize the genuine, overwhelming difficulty of motherhood, but then gives us an ending that glazes over all the problems she’s spent 400 pages cataloging. Does realism not apply to denouements? Perrotta’s ending, on the other hand, manages to be generally positive without undermining the issues and complexities explored in the novel.

I wonder—and this is a theory, not a statement—if one difference between literary and genre fiction is how they deal with truth: the former dishes it out relentlessly while the latter can’t quite look it in the eye.

We’ll see. I’m not judging all chick lit based on this one book. I’ll be back with reviews of Family Trust, Having It and Eating It, and maybe some of that quirky “Lad Lit” if I can get my hands on it.

Bestselling Mass Market Paperbacks, 2007

LisaApril 28, 2008May 29, 2014

Here they be.

1. Blood Brothers. Nora Roberts. Orig. Jove (2,247,730)
2. Cross
. James Patterson. Rep. Grand Central (1,831,296)
3. Angels Fall. Nora Roberts. Rep. Jove (1,655,329)
4. Judge & Jury. James Patterson & Andrew Gross. Rep. Grand Central (1,653,623)
5. Beach Road. James Patterson & Peter de Jonge. Rep. Grand Central (1,645,810)
6. Honeymoon. James Patterson & Howard Roughan. Rep. Grand Central (1,638,139)
7. Next. Michael Crichton. Rep. Harper (1,600,000)
8. Twelve Sharp. Janet Evanovich. Rep. St. Martin’s (1,500,000)
9. At Risk. Patricia Cornwell. Rep. Berkley (1,445,075)
10. The Collectors. David Baldacci. Rep. Grand Central (1,286,410)
11. Two Little Girls in Blue. Mary Higgins Clark. Rep. Pocket (1,231,500)
12. True Believer. Nicholas Sparks. Rep. Grand Central (1,205,824)
13. Echo Park. Michael Connelly. Rep. Grand Central (1,068,053)
14. At First Sight. Nicholas Sparks. Rep. Grand Central (1,035,993)
15. Dead Watch. John Sandford. Rep. Berkley (1,005,314)

Look at James Patterson go! He’s clearly still well utilizing the practice of getting authorial hopefuls to write his books. Interesting, though, how the title that was Patterson’s alone—Cross—sold ever so slightly more copies. Coincidence? Or do people actually dislike diluted Pattersons?

Nora Roberts is also still pumping out the books and raking in the checks, though this year she only had two titles in the top 15, for a total of almost four million copies. Impressive, sure, but compare to last year’s four titles and nine million copies (not to mention the comparative 4.3 million copies that Eat, Pray, Love sold—further kudos to Elizabeth Gilbert!). Perhaps she’s finally decided to take it easy, publishing only, you know, ten books a year or so. Hey, even cyborgs need a vacation.

And one has to ask (though one wishes she didn’t notice) where is Dan Brown? In 2006 he scaled both the Trade Paperback and Mass Market Paperback lists with over nine million copies of his novels sold; this year not a single one of his books sold even 100,000 copies. The list-dominator has simply vanished! Is his own shocking disappearance part of an elaborate promotional plan for his next novel…or has every single person in America finally read The Da Vinci Code?

The 2007 annual bestseller lists are here!

LisaApril 20, 2008May 29, 2014

Okay, they’ve been here, it turns out, for almost a month. But Publisher’s Weekly has this sneaky way of burying each year’s numbers in its voluminous archives, hiding their presence even from its own search engine. Very secretive, those folks.

PW publishes four different lists: Hardcover Fiction, Hardcover Nonfiction, Trade Paperbacks (both fiction and nonfiction), and Mass Market Paperbacks (fiction, often of the genre variety). Shall we start with the top fifteen Trade Paperbacks? (Click here for the full list.)

1. Eat, Pray, Love. Elizabeth Gilbert. Rep. Penguin (4,274,804)
2. The Kite Runner. Khaled Hosseini. Rep. Riverhead (2,022,041)
3. Water for Elephants. Sara Gruen. Rep. Algonquin (1,450,000)
4. The Road. Cormac McCarthy. Rep. Vintage (1,364,722)
5. The Memory Keeper’s Daughter. Kim Edwards. Rep. Penguin (1,362,585)
6. The Pillars of the Earth. Ken Follett. Rep. NAL (1,310,419)
7. Love in the Time of Cholera. Gabriel García Márquez. Rep. Vintage (1,298,554)
8. 90 Minutes in Heaven. Don Piper and Cecil Murphey. Orig. Revell (1,273,000)
9. Jerusalem Countdown. John Hagee. Revised. Frontline (1,200,000)
10. Middlesex. Jeffrey Eugenides. Rep. Picador (1,000,000)
11. Measure of a Man. Sidney Poitier. Orig. HarperOne (1,000,000)
12. Skinny Bitch. Rory Freedman and Kim Barnouin. Orig. Running Press (987,000)
13. Into the Wild. Jon Krakauer. Rep. Anchor (918,234)
14. Three Cups of Tea. Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin. Rep. Penguin (843,390)
15. The 5th Horseman. James Patterson & Maxine Paetro. Rep. Grand Central (707,340)

The majority of these are no surprise. Eat, Pray, Love. Yes, yes. The Kite Runner. Yes, yes. The Memory Keeper’s Daughter—last year’s number two. A third of these books are associated with Oprah in some way.

It’s numbers 8 and 9 that make me think things went a little wonky in ’07. I’m dismayed to see that 90 Minutes in Heaven—a book detailing a near-death experience and resulting life of devout Christianity—has actually gained in popularity (it was #9 last year), now selling a total of around 2 million copies. Funny how James Frey gets skewered for fabricating parts of his memoir, yet anyone can write these “visit to heaven” books with no proof whatsoever of their authenticity—and no one seems to care!

Sure, 90 Minutes in Heaven could have been a flukey favorite, but number 9 suggests instead that America’s religious curiosity is all aflame. The purpose of Jerusalem Countdown, written by some nutjob pastor, is to demonstrate through biblical prophecy how America’s prickly issues with Iran may lead to the Apocalypse. And people bought 1.2 million copies of it.

Of course, the presence of religious books on an annual bestseller list can also indicate a general case of the societal willies. In troubling times, even the confused and indifferent start reading the darnedest things. The two titles here are so typical of our culture’s hysterical extremism: we want to scare the crap out of ourselves with looming conflicts both material and supernatural, yet be reminded that redemption is available with just a little faith. So different, yet so comforting: for even as his horrors spill from heaven, Pastor Hagee reminds us that a plan governs the universe and all our lives.

I’m sorry to see that no first-time novelists scored this year, though one certainly can’t begrudge literary author and relative newcomer Sara Gruen her number-three spot for Water for Elephants.

Best book on the list: The Road. Followed closely by Pillars of the Earth and Middlesex.

Worst book on the list: Jerusalem Countdown. I think I can safely say this without reading a single word.

Eatin’, prayin’, lovin’

LisaMarch 25, 2008May 29, 2014

Never has a woman embodied that old saying “when a door closes, another one opens” quite like Elizabeth Gilbert.

There she was, married and nesting, trying to get preggers, when she realized that women who really want husbands and babies probably don’t sob for hours every night on their bathroom floors. Three years and one nasty divorce later, Gilbert had lost it all. Broke and bereft, she had no idea where to go or what to do.

Then her publisher had a great idea. They’d give Gilbert an advance that would enable her to travel abroad for a year, writing the book that would become the mega-bestseller Eat, Pray, Love.

Some people have all the luck.

Gilbert segmented her trip—and her book—into three equal parts. The first stop was Italy, home of gastronomic and linguistic pleasure; next came India, where all the serious people go to connect with God; finally, Bali, to learn…erm…something about balance. If you’ve been trolling this blog for a while, you’ll know I was not particularly keen to read Eat, Pray, Love, but I will happily admit that the book was much better than I feared. Gilbert’s writing is witty and charmingly self-deprecating, and she has a wonderful way of drawing threads through the story that make the whole journey—or at least the resulting book—cohesive and complete.

The section on Italy will make you drool. Hell, it’ll probably make you fat. (Is there a volume of Eat This Not That for Italian food? It’s probably Not That! No, Not That Either!) Gilbert’s life in Italy is almost unbearably dreamy. She does nothing but whatever she wants, every day—mainly eating gelato and speaking Italian—for four pound-packing months.

Oh, it hurts not to be her.

But I stopped feeling so envious in part two, when Gilbert heads to India for four months of spiritual calisthenics. I’m sure her descriptions are all very insightful and magical…but if you are not especially spiritual or into meditation you may find this portion of the book boring. Or loony. I sort of wanted to pat her on the head the whole time and say, “Sure, lady. Mm-hmm.” (And I’m not the only one. I talked to two genuine grade-A middle-aged moms—the demographic voted Most Likely to Inhale This Book—and even they skipped parts of this section.)

Finally, Gilbert whiles away the final leg of her journey in Bali, and in her search for balance she’s back to her old witty ways. Her portrayal of the culture and characters of this tiny Indonesian island is both charming and fascinating. And by the end, the broken woman we met at the beginning of the story has become happy, balanced, and whole.

So I gotta say that overall I was pleasantly surprised. Hear me now—Eat, Pray, Love is a thoughtful and enjoyable book.

But I do have to bring up one teensy weensy little thing.

I don’t think I’ve ever read a book that so brazenly celebrated self-absorption. I know, I know—it’s the genre. It’s what Gilbert’s publishers paid for. I get it. Still, what is with female readers and their excessive navel-gazing? Unlike most literary works, which at least cover a number of characters and ideas, this book is literally about one person. It’s kind of about the pursuit of pleasure; it’s kind of about praying; it’s kind of about balance. But mostly it’s about Elizabeth Gilbert. In short, one of America’s very favorite reads for the past 61 weeks is about someone who spends a year doing nothing but thinking about herself. Is this the new American dream? Looking at our literature, it certainly seems that way. Too bad only the very very fortunate get paid for it.

Bestsellers that Count

LisaMarch 13, 2008May 29, 2014

This post is by John Heath. Yes, he deigned to write a blog post. Whatta guy.

Unlike my chatty colleague in crime, it’s been several months since I spent focused time with bestsellers. Let’s call it “Da Vinci fatigue.” Did you miss me? Hmmn. Well, let’s pretend you did, and that you’re excited that I’m starting to get the itch again. Maybe it’s the anticipation of the appearance of Publishers Weekly’s bestselling lists for 2007. Maybe it’s spring fever. Maybe it’s just that rash again (don’t ask). In any case, a few weeks ago I plunged right back into the bestselling pond. Well, okay, not so much plunged as put my toe in, scouring the bestseller lists so far in 2008. And it turned out the water felt awfully familiar.

Predictable names dominate the fiction lists: Patterson, Evanovich, Albom, Cornwell, and of course the unstoppable trio of Grisham and Roberts and King (oh my!). Fitness, diet, and cookbooks are still the rage. Spiritual guides clog many of the top spots, including the inestimable advice of Montel Williams. For those not interested in his Living Well, there are dozens of vampire tales for the living dead. Business guides flourish, of course, proving once again novelist Chris Buckley’s wisdom that the only way to get rich from a get-rich book is to write one.  The ephemeral joys of pop biography (Tom Cruise) and auto-biography (Steve Martin) continue to appeal. Adding increased auctoritas to a relatively mundane collection are such classics as To Kill a Mockingbird, Night, Green Eggs and Ham, and Good Morning Moon. Oh, and of course, there’s that perennial spellbinder, The Official SAT Study Guide.

But there are a couple major differences between previous years and the 2008 lists so far. One is the remarkable absence of political spew in an election year. (I’ll have more to say about what this may signify at a later date, but that’s actually a substantive issue and I’m trying to keep this as shallow as possible. You don’t want to dive too deeply too fast into this bestseller stuff.) The most striking deviation from the past is in the titles, and I think our Why We Read What We Read may have had a salutary influence on the industry. The publishing titans no doubt read our analysis and jumped into action. In our survey of bestselling books over the past 16 years, we noted that there was an odd reliance on the number 7 (see pages 40-1). But so far bestsellers in 2008 have provided an unprecedented and nearly algebraic variety: Three Cups of Tea (due out soon, its sequel: Eight Trips to the Bathroom), 4-Hour Work Week, The Five Love Languages, The Six Sacred Stones, 12 Second Sequence (no, it’s not about sex), The Thirteenth Tale, Nineteen Minutes, 21 Pounds in 21 Days, 90 Minutes in Heaven (which beats Nineteen Minutes by over an hour), and, pummeling all others in numerical dust, A Thousand Splendid Suns. The author of The Nine was apparently so confident in the number that he felt it could stand alone as a bestselling noun.

It’s nice to know we’ve made a difference.

Eat This Not That

LisaMarch 2, 2008May 29, 2014

Holy crap, what a dumb name for a book. I know it’s been on the bestseller charts for a while, but I’ve been ignoring it because 1) it’s a diet book, yawn and 2) its title is so exceedingly lame.

But last night John and I went out in the world and spied this little volume with our own eyes. And I realized when I saw the cover that this was not your typical benign-but-forgettable book of diet advice.

See, the title wasn’t just the result of a lazy or uninspired author. Eat This Not That is literally the point of the whole book: it provides specific suggestions for what to eat and what not to eat at some of America’s most popular chain restaurants. Try the chili onion rings, not the nacho cheese bacon poppers. Order the fried butter, not the ham-and-lard sandwich. In other words, eat this [unhealthy garbage] instead of that [even more unhealthy garbage]. The book features two pages for each establishment—Applebee’s, Taco Bell, Cici’s Pizza—providing a list of thises and thats for each beloved, nasty greasehole.

Boy is this the perfect “diet” book for the modern era. Only Americans could be so retarded as to think that eating a Big Mac instead of a Whopper with Cheese will help them lose weight (yes, this is actually one of the proffered suggestions). That people would seriously buy and recommend this book (it’s got almost five stars on Amazon)—and that someone in good conscience could publish it—absolutely boggles the mind.

The only merit to Eat This Not That, I would say, is that it exposes just how horrible and fattening this kind of food really is. Even I didn’t know that a plate of Denny’s pancakes packs a walloping 980 calories, and I’m pretty obnoxious when it comes to caloric awareness. The book also goes on to offer general suggestions for making healthier food choices, but frankly the main thrust of the content is so ridiculous that I can’t give Eat This Not That even the teensiest endorsement. But maybe that’s not entirely fair. After all, while dieting you could be kidnapped and forced to eat at Popeye’s, and then this book would be totally useful. Riiight.

Look, I’m not saying I never ever eat this type of food—I do—but never would I dream that it was going to result in anything but bulges and flab. The plain truth is that no dieter should even breathe the fumes of any of these restaurants, and the fact that thousands of people are buying a book like Eat This Not That shows we are nowhere near to facing, let alone solving, our ever-swelling obesity epidemic.

Cloud Atlas

LisaFebruary 27, 2008May 29, 2014

So here’s a cool idea. You start a story, get the reader into it, and then abruptly cut it off 4o pages later—in mid-sentence, no less. Then you begin a totally different story, one that takes place in a different time with different characters—written, even, in a different style—and wriggle in a reference to the previous story somewhere in the process.

Then you do it five more times.

That’s the methodology underlying David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, which begins as a colonial travelogue but quickly morphs into a sassy correspondence—then a thriller—then a black comedy—then an interview—and finally a storytelling session in a tribal dialect of the future. But just when you’ve reached the last story—in the middle of the book, that is—the whole piece unwinds, returning to and tying up each story in reverse order.

As if that wasn’t painfully clever enough, Mitchell even has one of his characters, a musician, compose a piece called the “Cloud Atlas Sextet,” which shares the book’s structure. In a letter to a former lover, the character describes his work:

In the first set, each solo is interrupted by its successor: in the second, each interruption is recontinued, in order. Revolutionary or gimmicky? (445)

Well, the world has spoken, and it looks like the vote is for “revolutionary.” Or at least awesome.

Of course, even so, Cloud Atlas was not a bestseller. It often requires, like, concentration—which would explain why it took ME so long to finish it—and each plunge into a new story can leave you discombobulated. So this is definitely not your mainstream fare. But snobs and linguaphiles, take this one on! The reward for your efforts is lush and beautiful writing, the work of a clear master.

Three Cups of Whoop-ass

LisaFebruary 21, 2008May 29, 2014

You’d better think twice before slapping a fatwa on Greg Mortenson. Try to deny this dude his dream of educating Pakistani children and he will be all over your sorry terrorist-abiding ass. Oh sure, he’ll sit down with you, all civilized-like. But as soon as you’ve poured the tea, he’ll overturn the table and scald you with the requisite three cups, all the while screaming, “I’m gonna build you a school, mother****er!”

Oh, if only. Maybe that’s how the movie version will turn out.

Three Cups of Tea is a fine book. A fine book that could have used just a little spice. Journalist David Oliver Relin ably tells the story of unwitting hero Greg Mortenson, a mountain climber who gets lost during a K2 expedition and discovers not only a remote Pakistani village but his life’s purpose. Three Cups chronicles Mortenson’s efforts to build schools for the Middle East’s poorest children, thus fighting what he believes are the root causes of terrorism and religious extremism. Risking his life countless times, devoting himself in a way unimaginable to most of us, Mortenson is a remarkable and inspiring man who deserves every royalty he gets from this raging bestseller.

And yet this book didn’t quite grab me the way Reading Lolita in Tehran—to which it is frequently compared—did. I’m sure that’s partially because Lolita is about the transformative power of literature, and Three Cups is more vaguely about education—I dunno, math and crap. (I’m joking. I love math. But it doesn’t get me all misty.) It’s also, I think, because Three Cups is kind of a one-note inspirational experience, a reeeeaaaallly long Chicken Soup for the Soul selection. Mortenson is awesome. I believe it. But I believed it by page 10 and at that point there were still 320 pages to go.

That’s not to say I didn’t learn a lot. I learned about mountain climbing and construction and the Middle Eastern way of life (don’t rush it, man—the Pakistani chiefs are rather like the chilled-out surfers in my native Santa Cruz, though probably not as stoned). I learned that most Americans are into helping Buddhists but tend to shun the Muslims. And I learned that that’s just silly, because Muslims are poorer and will thus love you more when you lend a hand.

Okay, that’s not really the message of Three Cups, though the book says in no uncertain terms that Mortenson’s beneficent, education-bestowing presence in the Middle East combats terrorism and anti-American sentiment better than any military approach ever could. Passionate testimonials from all and sundry confirm the lasting dividends of both secular education and American lovingkindness, making the book positively pulse with a heartwarming (if heavy-handed) glow.

So: if you’re looking for an interesting plunge into another culture, a well-written chronicle of a real-life hero, Three Cups of Tea is the book for you. But if you’re looking for whoop-ass, even one cup of it, you’ll have to drink something besides Mortenson’s inspirational tea.

My first graphic novel

LisaFebruary 19, 2008May 29, 2014

Yeah, yeah, I know they’re not exactly new. But as a lifetime opponent of comic books, I was in no hurry to snuggle up to this genre. All those nonsensical premises. All that ridiculous dialogue. I had been told that graphic novels were different, but were they? I was too suspicious to find out for sure.

No doubt I would have continued down the path of words-only snobbery had it not been for a lazy weekend getaway and the recommendation of my friend Alice, a woman of excellent and eclectic taste. Having finally finished Three Cups of Tea (review forthcoming), and being so pathetically indolent as to require a book with pictures, I cracked open Alice’s copy of Tamara Drewe by Posy Simmonds.

Tamara Drewe takes place, seemingly, in my wildest dreams: a writer’s retreat in the English countryside, a drowsy little collection of cottages where members of the most self-indulgent profession can work in solitude, their every need met. But tensions brew amongst the proprietors and writers-in-residence—affairs, obsessions, and artistic differences that shatter the fragile peace and privacy sought by all.

The writing here is real—nothing like the excessive bluster and bolding so beloved to the comic book genre. And the art is simple but evocative. I truly enjoyed the interplay between words and images, the way the art enhances and deepens the text. I don’t see myself reading a ton of graphic novels in the future, but I would certainly reserve a spot in my library for other books of this ilk. Just call me a late adopter.

Help! I can’t finish anything

LisaFebruary 3, 2008

Don’t you hate it when you’re reading a bunch of books but none of them really do it for you?

That’s been my problem over the past couple of weeks. If only the books I’m reading were actually bad! Then I could stop—or (more likely) finish them right away and gleefully write them up in this blog.

So here’s what I’m slogging through:

Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin—this is my “big bestseller” selection; it’s currently #6 on the USA Today list, enjoying its 47th week of fame. It’s about this dude, Greg Mortenson, who gets lost during a K2 climbing expedition and finds his way to a remote village in Pakistan. Befriending the natives, Mortenson agrees to return and build a school for the village children. Three Cups of Tea is the story of Mortenson’s personal journey from mountain-climbing hippie to nonprofit CEO, the story of what he gives to and learns from some of the poorest communities on earth.

There is nothing inherently bad about this book. The writing is quite good and the story is interesting, even inspiring, a la Reading Lolita in Tehran. But god-dang is it detailed. I’m halfway in and Mortenson still hasn’t finished his first school. It makes me feel a bit like I’m in school with a bad case of senioritis.

Next up is Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. Now I realize this is a cult classic. I also realized within about 10 pages that this was a cult to which I was never going to belong. I find the writing amusing (this is a good thing; I’m supposed to) and I always applaud the silly people who manage to make it in the arts. But I just don’t, can’t, care about anything that happens in this book. Just don’t. Just can’t. In the introduction, the authors write about rabid fans who’ve read this book so many times it has been dropped in puddles, baked in souffles, and incorporated into their nervous systems. My mind is boggled by such ardor. But I am happy for the authors all the same.

I’m also slowly climbing through The Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, a real literary work with an excruciatingly clever organization scheme that I am legitimately enjoying. The problem here is that I actually have to concentrate on this book and I am fresh out of brain cells most evenings.

So instead I’ve been turning to Over the Hill and Between the Sheets, a lighthearted collection about sex and love in middle age, edited by Gail Belsky. I actually picked this up as research for a project I’m beginning, but it turned out to be a fine read, especially when I was feeling too exhausted for school-building, random silliness, or excruciating cleverness. Marriage, divorce, adultery, botox—all are covered here. But my favorite selection of the bunch is Stephan Wilkinson’s “Mechanical Failure,” a story about life—and sex—after prostatectomy, “the all-too-common operation performed to excise prostate cancer” that “often snips the nerve that provokes an erection” and shortens the penis, to boot. Wilkinson speaks with candor and good humor about his adventures with penis pumps, hypodermic needles, and ultimately choosing life over intercourse.

But I finished the book, sadly—no more avoiding the rest! Since it’s raining today and I don’t do football*, I will attempt to free myself from at least one of the literary rocks so assiduously lashed to my ankles.

* unless someone brings me tasty snacks

A Thousand Splendid Suns

LisaJanuary 24, 2008May 29, 2014

So, Afghanistan pretty much sucks.

Not inherently, of course. (I’m sure it’s lovely in the springtime.) But it’s had various inhabitants over the past 30-odd years that have made it really hard to kick back and enjoy the scenery. Especially if you’re a girl.

Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns has oft been described to me as “the sequel to The Kite Runner, told from a woman’s point of view.” That’s half true; it’s not a sequel (as I mentioned in an earlier post), but it is told entirely from the perspectives of two women. The novel begins with Mariam, the illegitimate daughter of a wealthy man. Forced to marry, Mariam finds herself wedded to a strict husband whose brutal tendencies begin to emerge as she proves incapable of bringing a child to term. After nearly twenty miserable years, Mariam’s husband takes another wife, Laila—a beautiful young woman, newly and secretly pregnant, who agrees to marry so she can save her reputation and protect her absent lover’s unborn child. The relationship between the two imprisoned and abused wives is the essence of the story.

I’m having a hard time pinpointing what I think about this novel. The writing is good; the story is good. And it does an excellent job of exposing the misery and helplessness endured by women in the clutches of an extremist society. But I do think Hosseini veers toward the simplistic in both his books, creating bad men who are too one-sided to be interesting. Of course, his subjects are abusive husbands and Taliban bigwigs: what choice does he have? Still, I would say that at times his “big” stories and “bad” characters undermine the best parts of his novels—those that bypass the inarguable evils and explore simple humanity.

My Bestseller Article on BeneathTheCover.com

LisaJanuary 20, 2008May 29, 2014

Hey! My article, “How NOT to Write a Bestseller,” went up last week, but I just discovered it! I’m so on top of things. Beneath the Cover is a great place to find articles on all aspects of the book industry.


A Thousand Splendid Novels about Afghanistan

LisaJanuary 17, 2008May 29, 2014

…this is what it seems we can expect from Khaled Hosseini. I just finished the man’s second work, A Thousand Splendid Suns, and will review it here soon. But the book got me thinking about the relationship between branding and creativity, and I just had to share.

Hosseini of course is famous for his super-selling first novel, The Kite Runner, a story about a boy growing up in Afghanistan who later comes to the United States, eventually returning to his native country to fight (one member of) the Taliban and make amends for childhood crimes. Then came A Thousand Splendid Suns in 2007. I can’t count how many people have told me that this was the sequel to The Kite Runner.

But I just read it. And it’s not a sequel. It’s a book that happens to be set in Afghanistan, a book whose cover has the same color scheme and typesetting as Hosseini’s first—but a book with completely different characters.

It may be a simple mistake, yes. But I wonder how much the “branding” of literary authors affects what they write and how readers perceive what they write. It used to be that only genre authors were expected to produce the same kind of book over and over, but more and more I see literary authors being “tracked” in the same way. Oh, Khaled Hosseini writes about Afghanistan. Oh, Mitch Albom writes sappy stuff. So-and-so writes about lonely coal miners. Every book might as well be a sequel because the major characteristics don’t change.

I think it says a lot about our shifting reasons for reading literary fiction. The repetitive nature of genre fiction makes some sense: readers are often looking for a certain kind of repeated experience when they pick up a thriller, mystery, or romance novel. But the reasons for reading literary fiction used to be, I think, quite different: readers wanted a unique experience each time. They didn’t want the same book. They didn’t want the same themes. They didn’t want the book to conjure the same emotions. They didn’t want to look at a novel’s cover and instantly associate it with the author’s fourteen previous offerings.

Maybe it’s just me. I have always admired authors with broad talent, those who tackle varied subjects, characters, and approaches. That’s not to say writers don’t have their favorite themes and trademark styles; that’s always been the case. But today’s authors—at least the bestselling ones—seem to write in a much narrower range than writers of yore. And I wonder if the current obsession with branding is increasingly going to prevent talented authors from branching out, pressure them to remain within one tiny niche for the duration of their careers.

I truly hope not. One of the best things about reading literary fiction—about reading anything, in my view—is the element of surprise. And I don’t mean which bad guy will die first or how. I mean what the book will really be about, the questions and themes it will raise in my mind. For reading to be intellectually valuable, I think it has to be at least somewhat diverse.

So if Khaled Hosseini writes another novel about Afghanistan, I probably won’t read it. Not because I don’t like his writing. But because I don’t want a brand—I want a book.

Wait, Avoid, Ignore

LisaJanuary 8, 2008May 29, 2014

Okay, so should I read Eat, Pray, Love? I know it’s #1 on the USA Today list right now. I know it’s been a bestseller for 50 weeks, and it’s surely going to be on the annual bestseller list for 2007. And I know that reading it will give me untold insights into the American psyche. Well, maybe.

But its name just totally bugs me. I know that sounds stupid, but I’m really into names, and this one is just…ugh. It smacks of A Female Journey, all serious and misty.

Am I wrong? Am I a jerk? Is this book wonderful? Please enlighten me!

Money for Nothing

LisaDecember 30, 2007May 29, 2014

In Why We Read What We Read, John and I discuss how many of the business/finance books of the 90s contain a spiritual element, a conviction that material success could (and should) be linked to emotional well-being. These warm ‘n’ fuzzy notions seemed to be petering out in the last several years, as evidenced by the giant sales of amoral hits such as Good to Great. Well, the success of Tim Ferriss’ The 4-Hour Workweek may be proof that America is over the touchy-feelys once and for all.

It’s not like Ferriss encourages readers to make money by kicking lepers and killing endangered frogs. But a book of good, old-fashioned values this is not. Just so you know what kind of dude we’re dealing with, here are a few of Ferriss’ more questionable suggestions:

1) Trying to dream up an online business? Ferriss says sell whatever will sell—his own fortune (around $40K a month) comes from peddling sketchy nutritional supplements.

2) Trying to make the jump from office-based to home-based (and thus sun-soaked paradise-based) employment? Just deceive your boss by looking much more productive from home, and then work about two hours a day thereafter, collecting the same salary.

3) Tired of dumb, time-slurping chores? Hire an overseas personal assistant for a few dollars an hour to make travel arrangements, buy gifts, do research—you name it.

4) Want to do something extraordinary? Exploit the technicalities. Ferriss himself won the gold medal at the Chinese Kickboxing National Championships thusly:

Using dehydration techniques I now teach to elite powerlifters, I lost 28 pounds in 18 hours, weighed in at 65 pounds, and then hyperhydrated back to 193 pounds. It’s hard to fight someone from three weight classes above you. Poor little guys…[He continues] If one combatant fell off the elevated platform three times in a single round, his opponent won by default. I decided to use this technicality as my single technique and just push people off. (29-30)

To be fair, these seedy tidbits are sprinkled throughout what seems to be pretty good advice on a number of topics. First, Ferriss takes time explaining the mentality of the “New Rich,” as he calls them—which is to enjoy life now, filling it with hobbies and learning and “mini-retirements” rather than doing endless soul-sucking work to save up money for some long-distant and vaguely conceived retirement. (Hard to argue with that one.) He also offers helpful productivity tips for both employees and entrepreneurs, including specific techniques for preventing interruptions and severely limiting time spent on meetings, phone calls, and e-mail.

But the best way to make money and free yourself to do what you wish, Ferriss says, is to own a small, automated, online business that brings in the income you need (it doesn’t have to be a ton—just enough to pay your bills and make your “dreamlines” possible, whatever those may be). For best results, this business should sell a product costing the customer $50-200 and be marketed to a very specific niche. Ferriss provides detailed instructions on how to test out the selling potential of a product, then how to automate the selling process so that the lucky business owner has to do as little as possible.

Does it work? How the hell should I know? It sounds good, but of course the magic part is coming up with the right product to create, resell, license, or manufacture. Ferriss can’t help you there; you have to rely on your own imagination and expertise. In other words, most of us are screwed.

Finally, Ferriss uses the end of the book to provide tips for long-term world travel and residence and—most unnecessarily, I suspect—how to keep that spring in your step when extraordinary wealth grows boring and angst-inducing.

The writing is sarcastic and funny, though the book is a bit scattered, since it’s basically a manual for living like a man who places a heavy premium on regular world travel—which may not be possible or even desirable for those with kids, dogs, or airplane phobias. Still, it’s easy for the reader to pick and choose the chapters that appeal. The book also provides lots of cool online resources for everything from how to register oneself as a media expert to how to rate charities.

But ultimately, I have to predict that most readers will not achieve a 4-hour workweek or anything close after reading this book, and not just because they lack the courage to think outside the box. The 4-Hour Workweek is probably most useful for true entrepreneurial spirits and those who already have successful online businesses and want to automate them. Most of us slouches, I fear, will find the ideas exciting, the fantasy tantalizing, but the brilliant products—and the resulting cold hard cash—all too elusive.

The Emperor’s Children

LisaDecember 23, 2007May 29, 2014

Sometimes it’s just nice to read a book about people. Even if they are sort of spoiled, whiny people. I liked Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children, though for the longest time I thought it was a book about China. You know, emperors…China. And since I’d just read Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, I held off.

But I was so wrong. Instead it’s about a handful of rather self-indulgent New York literati, their neurotic insides entertainingly illuminated by Messud’s witty hand. I didn’t think it a particularly profound book, but it’s a good character novel nonetheless—a great way to disappear for a while in the heads of some charming strangers and their secrets and lies.

Messud does take a bit too long, in my opinion, to bring all the storylines together (about half the book), but once they meshed, I was hooked. I always find it fascinating to read about young East Coast writers, who seem to score appointments at national literary magazines just by flashing their English degrees and tossing their hair. That s*** just doesn’t happen in California, no matter how good you are.

Kingdom Come

LisaDecember 16, 2007May 29, 2014
Too busy to read my long review? Skip right to the song instead.


I just knew that something really sick and wrong would happen to me if I wrote Why We Read What We Read. All this knowledge had to come at some serious spiritual cost; and while I knew I looked at books differently than I had before, I didn’t fully realize just how deeply my depraved new mentality had taken hold. Not until the other day when, for absolutely no explicable reason, I found myself checking out Kingdom Come, the sequel to the Left Behind series, from the library.

I am the last person who has any business reading this book. I bitched and moaned through all 12 volumes of Left Behind. I was so happy when Jesus finally showed up in Glorious Appearing, the last book, gutting all the nonbelievers and saving me from reading any more.

And yet there I was with the sequel in my hand.

What I have since come to see is that even when the devil is locked up tight, the world and the flesh still wreak havoc on our tender and temptable souls. (I learned from Kingdom Come that Satan, the world, and the flesh comprise the legs of the “three-legged stool of evil” (51)—a terrifying piece of furniture indeed!) The world got me big time, that’s for sure, taking advantage of the ragingly morbid curiosity that keeps me reading bad books and avoiding my formerly wholesome ways.

But enough on my spiritual decline: A summary/refresher is in order! The Left Behind books are the literary offspring of a minister, Tim LaHaye, and a writer, Jerry B. Jenkins, who teamed up to present their vision of the Rapture—the day that God whisks his Christian faithful to heaven and leaves everyone else to deal with plagues and general persecution. Called the “most successful Christian-fiction series ever” by Publishers Weekly, the Left Behind books have sold about a bajillion copies, converted thousands to Christianity, and pissed off countless others with their hardcore fundamentalist values and unapologetically literal interpretation of the Bible.

The original 12 books of the series detail the events of the Tribulation—the seven-year period between the Rapture and the reappearance of Christ on earth—focusing on a handful of principal characters and a full ensemble cast as they attempt to thwart the Antichrist and turn as many souls to Jesus as they can. Kingdom Come, then—the sequel—covers Jesus’ 1000-year reign of peace after the Antichrist is gone, Satan confined, and nonbelievers snuffed.

You’re probably wondering why a book needs to be written about a thousand-year reign of peace. But the authors have heard this one before and, as always, they have a ready answer:

Do you ever wonder whether this thousand years that precedes the new heaven and the new earth might be boring? Yes, Jesus will be there, He whom we all have longed to see and worship in person ever since we became believers. But with only the like-minded there—at least initially—what will everyone do? Sit around and worship? (xliii)

That’s a good bit of it, but the authors encourage us to “imagine euphoria that shows no sign of abating” as an antidote to the repetition. Still, they seem to realize that endless euphoria does not a novel make. After the characters get settled in the new world—where the rivers literally run with milk and wine, where leopards eat leaves and snuggle with bears, where humans too are vegetarians except for the occasional random festival when Jesus gets a hankering for a hearty rib-eye (38)—the book jumps 95 years later to some (marginally) more troubling times.

Aging works differently in the Millennial Kingdom. Those who were Raptured, or who died during the Tribulation, have “glorified bodies” and forever look their hottest. But those who were still alive when Jesus arrived simply age more slowly. People less than a century old look and act like adolescents, and it is these squirrelly youngsters that cause the book’s main conflict.

See, at this stage God allows all children 100 years to become believers. Anyone who doesn’t will die on his or her hundredth birthday. And yes, even though Jesus is a flesh-and-blood reality for everybody at this point, there are still those who refuse to accept His dominion over their lives. They keep their doubts hidden, forming a secret society called The Other Light (TOL) where they worship Lucifer and hope to pass their message on through the remaining nine centuries—even though they themselves will die—to the day when Satan is released and (they retardedly think) will somehow take God’s spot and bring them all back to life. They spend their remaining few years livin’ it up with drugs and whores.

These are typical Left Behind tactics. Some of the holdouts make good sense, explaining that God offers them no true free will, only a choice that is no choice at all. The authors seem to understand this complaint, but then they can’t resist muddying up its adherents with devil-worship and drug use. Questioning why it’s God’s way or the highway is portrayed as nothing more than teenage rebellion. And, let’s face it, the nonbelievers in this book just look like empty-headed twits. What’s needed here is what’s been missing all along in this series—an acknowledgment that a God who does things like send plagues, viciously slaughter unbelievers, and impose arbitrary time limits for conversion just might not be all that nice a guy. Admitting that doesn’t actually mean one has to worship Lucifer.

But the point of Kingdom Come, ultimately, is not really to explore these questions, or even to tell a compelling story. It pretends to do both, but it honestly offers about half the depth and effort of the earlier novels (and that’s, holy crap, really saying something). On it own, it won’t convert and it won’t entertain. All it can really do is make today’s real-life Christians feel good about 1) themselves and 2) their proselytizing by further simplifying the religious debate, basically eliminating the intriguing emotional struggles that the protagonists experienced in the preceding books. Even Jesus seems lazy this time around: at the end of the Millennium, He vaporizes the billions of devil-worshippers in an instant, rather than spilling their blood by hand as he so enjoyed doing in Glorious Appearing.

So, I gotta say, this is just a book that didn’t need to be written. All of the Left Behind novels lack suspense—mainly because the characters are always telling us what is going to happen—but this one is by far the most wanting of dramatic tension. Nothing happens! Nothing matters! Let’s hope Kingdom Come was exactly what it seemed to be: a final dabble that allowed the authors to say goodbye to these characters and move on. With any luck their future efforts will lie elsewhere, but as long as the three-legged stool of evil is in the world, one can never tell.

(My own closure came in the form of this little parody of “Jesus Loves Me.” Enjoy!)

Cormac McCarthy and the worst hotel in Europe

LisaNovember 30, 2007May 29, 2014

Much of our recent trip to Madrid was paid by conference organizers, who had booked John to teach a workshop and give a talk the last three days we were there. How exciting! we thought. Four free nights in a fancy hotel!

It turned out to be the Worst Hotel in Europe. By “worst,” I don’t mean shabbiest or scariest. That’s what was so devilish about the Auditorium Madrid. When you pull up, it looks fine. But just a few steps past the respectable lobby and you start to notice the weird decorations and creepy paintings (dead dogs! how inviting!), the looming warehouse feel. After negotiating block after block of stacked halls, you finally turn down the one you’ve been assigned, shards of cheap berber carpet burrowing into your nostrils. Your room holds a pair of mattresses with bulging springs, everything drenched in stale choking smoke and the kind of lighting that makes you want to drink yourself to death.

This place. Man, what can I say? From a distance, it looks like a Soviet prison. From the inside, it looks like The Shining.

But all I had to do was sleep there, right? If only! The hotel is charmingly located off a freeway near the airport in nearby Barajas. You literally cannot walk out of there safely. The hotel has no store (!), no vending machines (!!)—and the city of Madrid is a 15-minute drive away, a $30 cab ride each way. There’s a restaurant in the hotel, but it’s equally expensive and bordering on inedible. Trapped, depressed, and starving, I took to hoarding crumbs in our room, trying to make meals out of tiny oranges and stale bread.

Yet this soul-sucking place turned out to be the perfect location to read Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Always on the brink of death, McCarthy’s postapocalyptic protagonist shepherds his young son through a poisoned world. Ash falls constantly from the sky; plants and animals have ceased to exist. And other human survivors are no consolation: most have become murderous thugs, teeth “claggy with human flesh” (64). The man and the boy (their only appellations in the book) must be smart and wily, searching constantly for preserved foods that somehow eluded earlier seekers—and evading the depraved survivors who would kill and eat them.

By then all stores of food had given out and murder was everywhere upon the land. The world soon to be largely populated by men who would eat your children in front of your eyes and the cities themselves held by cores of blackened looters who tunneled among the ruins and crawled from the rubble white of tooth and eye carrying charred and anonymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers in the commissaries of hell. The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor and the cold crept down and the dark came early and the scavengers passing down the steep canyons with their torches trod silky holes in the drifted ash that closed behind them silently as eyes. Out on the roads the pilgrims sank down and fell over and died and the bleak and shrouded earth went trundling past the sun and returned again as trackless and as unremarked as the path of any nameless sisterworld in the ancient dark beyond. (152-53)

Never have I envisioned such an ugly world, yet rarely have I encountered such beautiful writing. McCarthy’s style shifts from spare to breathless and back again, its diction always delightful. His frequent use of fragments upset me at first, but I soon fell into the rhythm of the narrative—a combination of brief dialogue and the man’s stream of consciousness—and forgave the author all his grammatical indiscretions. (This is not an invitation to my writing students, however, to follow suit.)

The writing makes this book. The vision is disturbing; the premise is compelling; but it’s the writing that makes the story a Pulitzer Prize winner. Even at its simplest, it conveys not only the horror, barrenness, and loneliness of McCarthy’s ravaged planet, but the unflinching devotion between parent and child, the struggle to maintain both morality and dignity in a world that rewards only the most inhuman and ruthless.

The boy looked down the road.
I want you to tell me. It’s okay.
He shook his head.
Look at me, the man said.
He turned and looked. He looked like he’d been crying.
Just tell me.
We wouldn’t ever eat anybody, would we?
No. Of course not.
Even if we were starving?
We’re starving now.
You said we weren’t.
I said we weren’t dying. I didn’t say we weren’t starving.
But we wouldn’t.
No. We wouldn’t.
No matter what.
No. No matter what.
Because we’re the good guys.
Yes.
And we’re carrying the fire.
And we’re carrying the fire. Yes. (108-09)

The Road had a powerful effect on me. On the one hand, trapped in the Worst Hotel in Europe with no food and some seriously grim lighting, I related wholeheartedly to the man’s struggle. On the other hand, I actually enjoyed escaping into McCarthy’s fictional landscape, which was so much worse than my real-life one and yet so beautifully rendered that I couldn’t stay away. Still, it was all so dark. Shifting my attention back and forth between hotel and book, I grew increasingly depressed and really started to sympathize with the protagonist’s long-gone wife, who took herself out when she realized that being raped and eaten was not really how she wanted things to end.

Luckily, in the brink of time, a plane came and whisked me out of that hellhole and returned my suicidal depression levels to normal. But The Road is definitely still with me, perhaps even more so now that my stomach is full and my lighting is cheerful. The Road is haunting. It’s wonderful. Look at it this way: it was so good, even staying at the Auditorium Madrid Hotel was worth it.

*

John’s song about the hotel, sung to the tune of “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da”:

Trapped here in the Hotel Auditorium
Only five years old and strangely drab
Lord I hope the hotel shuttle bus will come
Because it’s 20 euros just to catch a cab.

There’s no doubt gonna shout let me out – BRA!
La la la la let me out
There’s no doubt gonna shout let me out – BRA!
La la la la let me out

Bridge:
In a couple of hours you are feeling negative
In a couple of days you are so depressed
You’ve lost your will to live

(At that point he lost his will to live and couldn’t finish the song.)

Justice is served

LisaNovember 28, 2007May 29, 2014

So I wrote this post last month about how I was going to become a bestselling author writing affliction fiction about a woman with Restless Legs Syndrome. And some lady got all mad at me for making fun of RLS. But I have been punished for my sins! I don’t think I have RLS exactly, but I have an odd and frustrating pain in my left leg that actually hurts quite a bit and even when I don’t sleep on it, I wake up with lots of pain. So see, there is a God.

But I still think RLS is funny.

Suite Francais

LisaNovember 23, 2007May 29, 2014

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! We’re in Madrid for the holiday. I’d love to say I picked up the #1 Spanish-language bestseller, Ayuda! Hay un perro loco en los pantalones! —but that would require some Spanish skills about 1,800 levels greater than my own. We’re really great at starting conversations—”una mesa para cuatro, por favor”—but inevitably the target responds, dousing us in light-speed syllables that sap us of all hope and self-esteem. “No entiendo,” we finally whimper. At least, unlike John, I have not ordered a goat instead of a beer.

In between gross faux pas I have been reading the books I carted along with me, starting with Suite Francais by Irene Nemirovsky—a woman whose name contains unsettling, multi-directional accents that I am far too lazy to figure out how to recreate. I can honestly say I’ve never read a novel like Suite—namely because it’s only 2/5 of one, the only sections that Nemirovsky was able to finish before she was arrested by the Nazis and murdered at Auschwitz. A Russian-born Jew living in Paris, Nemirovsky was a popular and well-regarded novelist in Europe when the Germans invaded France. Suite Francais was her attempt to capture the events she was witnessing firsthand, to explore the complex feelings and experiences of people in wartime.

Part one, “Storm in June,” follows several characters of varying classes as they flee Paris and the advancing German forces. The more narrowly-focused second part, “Dolce,” centers on a few important characters living in the French town of Bussy, where each family is forced to house a German soldier. Here Nemirovsky explores the relationships between the occupiers and the occupied, the struggle between nationalism and individualism that the French experience as they begin to get to know—and like—and even love—the conquering warriors.

Nemirovsky takes no sides here. She does not vilify either the individual German soldiers or the French women who warm to them. In fact it is usually the most huffily nationalistic and adamantly unsympathetic that serve as antagonists in both “Storm in June” and “Dolce.” Concern for others, openness to emotion, acknowledgment of a shared humanity—these are the characteristics that mark her protagonists.

Nemirovsky’s charity becomes chilling as one moves on to the appendices of Suite Francais. The first contains excerpts of her notes on the novel, showing how the first two parts—somewhat disconnected—were to cohere later on; the second is a collection of letters chronicling Nemirovsky’s steadily worsening situation and eventual disappearance.

I’m not usually one to care about author biographies, but in relationship to the unfinished novel I found the appendices both moving and terrible. They play the part of the unwritten three sections, reinforcing Nemirovsky’s thematic intentions, but also somehow making an even larger, stronger statement about the senselessness and evil of prejudice and hate. Nemirovsky had no illusions about what would befall her; as early as 1941 she suspected her end. Yet she wrote in her notes: “I swear here and now never again to take out my bitterness, no matter how justifiable, on a group of people, whatever their race, religion, convictions, prejudices, errors” (342).

As we’ve seen throughout contemporary fiction, villains are those without empathy; heroes are the ones who maintain the wisdom and grace to sympathize, connect, and forgive. Reading Suite Francais, I see more clearly than ever that such distinctions are not confined to imaginary worlds alone.

Posts navigation

Previous 1 2 3 4 Next

Latest Posts

  • Best review yet of You Knew He Had Kids
  • Frequently Asked Questions about Society of Stepmothers
  • Random Facts about The Evil Sweater and Other Stories
  • Free recipe: Chocolate Raspberry Croissant
  • Free recipe: Simple Mint

All Categories

  • My Books (21)
    • Evil Sweater (1)
    • Feshy's Dreamworld (1)
    • S'mores (2)
    • Society of Stepmothers (2)
    • Why We Read What We Read (15)
  • News & Blabber (5)
  • Reviews (61)
    • A Book from Every Country (5)
    • Audiobooks (5)
    • Bestsellers (40)
    • Favorites (3)
    • Fiction (41)
    • No-Spoiler Book Reviews (13)
    • Nonfiction (17)
Copyright All Rights Reserved | Theme: BlockWP by Candid Themes.