Review: A Glass of Blessings, by Barbara Pym

Wilmet Forsyth is a bored housewife in 1950s England.  She and her husband Rodney have no children, and he takes her for granted, like part of the furniture.  So Wilmet looks for stimulation elsewhere, and finds it, in a way, in the life of her church.  Specifically, she takes a keen interest in the lives of three unmarried priests and their male housekeeper.  She also joins her mother-in-law in taking Portuguese lessons from Piers Longridge, the attractive brother of her friend Rowena.  This  is yet another idle activity: Wilmet has no need to learn the language, but it fills up otherwise empty time.  The only real excitement in her life comes when she finds herself the object of Piers’ attention, and Rowena’s husband Harry begins flirting with her.  Rodney is oblivious, which gives Wilmet considerable freedom, but dampens her excitement as well.

Readers experience the story through Wilmet’s narration, which is rather unfortunate since she is insufferable.  Pym makes this clear early on, when Wilmet says, “I was pleased at his compliment for I always take trouble with my clothes, and being tall and dark I usually manage to achieve some kind of distinction.” (p. 5)  Later, when a church member is seriously ill, she hopes to make herself useful: “I suppose I had imagined myself busy in a practical way — cooking meals or running errands, even being what people call a tower of strength.” (p. 107)  Wilmet is completely serious, but this is typical Pym humor.  Her characters are always well-drawn, their foibles obvious and amusing.  I enjoyed her digs at Wilmet, and her portrayal of certain minor characters, such as the housekeeper Mr. Bason and Piers’ flatmate, Keith.

However, it was difficult for me to get over my dislike for WIlmet, and I didn’t care much about resolving the conflict that stemmed from her idle flirtations.  In the end, this was a respectable read but not my favorite Pym.

Review: Life After Life, by Kate Atkinson

When I was in my teens, summer nights were often spent in the company of three or four neighbor kids, all the same age.  I remember sitting under the stars, eating pizza, playing cards, and sharing our hopes and dreams.  One summer, we became a little obsessed with the ways small events could completely change our lives.  It probably started with something serious, but eventually we came to see even the tiniest detail as potentially significant:  “If I hadn’t eaten this pizza, our whole lives would be different.”  It was a bit of silliness, really, but reading Life After Life sent me down memory lane, wondering which seemingly inconsequential events and decisions actually had far-reaching consequences.

In Life After Life, Ursula Todd is born again and again, and each time her life takes a different course.  She dies repeatedly, in many ways and at different times.  In the first few pages, Ursula dies immediately after birth.  Later, an adult Ursula dies in one of several bomb blasts in London during World War II.  Each of her lives plays out differently, and often has an effect on the lives of family members and friends.  Sometimes Ursula’s life feels vaguely familiar to her:

And sometimes, too, she knew what someone was about to say before they said it or what mundane incident was about to occur—if a dish was about to be dropped or an apple thrown through a glasshouse, as if these things had happened many times before. Words and phrases echoed themselves, strangers seemed like old acquaintances.

And at other times, she acts impulsively to change the course of events:

Ursula had done a wicked thing, she had pushed Bridget down the stairs. Bridget might have died and she would have been a murderer now. All she knew was that she had to do it. The great sense of dread had come over her and she had to do it.

I absolutely loved this book.  Kate Atkinson brilliantly constructed a series of intricate life stories, repeatedly taking the reader back to specific points in time: Ursula’s birth, the 1918 Armistice, the London Blitz.  It was fascinating to see lives take so many paths, and how often this was due more to small everyday events than to life’s “big decisions.” I enjoyed the way Ursula would sometimes act to change the future based on knowledge from an earlier life.  Atkinson also kept me guessing about other characters in the story.  In one life, something bad would happen to them.  Would it happen again in Ursula’s next life?  Or would their fate take a slightly different turn?

Life After Life was a bit like working a challenging puzzle.  This book begs to be re-read as I’m sure there are details I missed.  And I know I’d enjoy it just as much the next time, and the next …

Short and Sweet: The Means of Escape, by Penelope Fitzgerald

The May edition of Short & Sweet is coming to you earlier than usual.  If you’ve followed along, you’ll know I’ve worked my way through a pile of short stories, usually as bedtime reading.  This month I read The Means of Escape by Penelope Fitzgerald.  Or rather, I read half of it.  I have no idea why I had this book on my shelves, seeing as I really disliked Fitzgerald’s Booker Prize-winning novel, Offshore.  I should have known better.

The Means of Escape is a mercifully short collection of ten stories.  I read half of them before throwing in the towel.  The title story, where a woman helps an escaped convict in hopes of running off with him, was the best of the bunch.  One story, The Prescription, was so indecipherable to me that my notes just say, “???”.  The last story I read, The Axe, began with promise.  It took the form of a letter written by a manager who had recently made a long-time employee redundant.  Clearly he felt the decision was unjust and had sympathy for the employee.  But it took a sudden turn into very strange territory, and that’s when I knew I was done with this book.

This book was just too full of “quirky” characters and bizarre situations.  These might work better in a long-form novel, but encountering a new set every ten pages or so was just too much for me.

(DNF)

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Next month I’ll be reading Chorus of Mushrooms, by Hiromi Goto. Watch for the next installment of Short & Sweet!

Review: The Big Rock Candy Mountain, by Wallace Stegner

Long afterward, Bruce looked back on the life of his family with half-amused wonder at its rootlessness. The people who lived a lifetime in one place, cutting down the overgrown lilac hedge and substituting barberry, changing the shape of the lily pool from square to round, digging out old bulbs and putting in new, watching their trees grow from saplings to giants that shaded the house, by contrast seemed to walk a dubious line between contentment and boredom. What they had must be comfortable, pleasant, worn smooth by long use; they did not feel the edge of change. (p. 374)

The Big Rock Candy Mountain tells the story of the Mason family, who lived in the western United States in the first half of the 20th century.  It opens with Elsa leaving her home in Minnesota after her widowed father marries her best friend.  Elsa meets and marries Harry “Bo” Mason, a restless idealist with a continuous stream of ideas for making big money.  Whenever Bo lost interest in his current business venture, they pulled up stakes and moved on to the next opportunity, the “Big Rock Candy Mountain where life was effortless and rich and unrestricted and full of adventure and action, where something could be had for nothing.”  As you might imagine, things never panned out as expected, and their life was a hard one filled with dashed hopes and unrealized expectations.  Bo and Elsa had two sons, Chet and Bruce, who experienced not only Bo’s whims, but also his strict parenting style and volatile temper.  By the end of the story, the boys have grown up and the family is deeply scarred.

It sounds like a real downer, doesn’t it?  Well, yes, it is.  For several days nagging, low-grade feelings of anger and sadness infiltrated my heart and mind.  I was angry at the way Bo jerked them around, and the ways he emotionally manipulated his wife and children. But Stegner was a very skilful storyteller.  Each time Bo lit on a new scheme, I hoped it would work out for them.  I celebrated small victories, and mourned losses.  When the influenza epidemic hit their rural town, I felt both desperation and hope.  As Bruce comes of age he plays a larger part in the story, and I was right there with him as he tried to make sense of the man he has become:

“I suppose,” he wrote, “that the understanding of any person is an exercise in genealogy. A man is not a static organism to be taken apart and analyzed and classified. A man is movement, motion, a continuum. There is no beginning to him. he runs through his ancestors, and the only beginning is the primal beginning of the single cell in the slime. The proper study of mankind is man, but man is an endless curve on the eternal graph paper, and who can see the whole curve?”  (p. 436)

In the novel’s last pages, the adult Bruce reflects on life with his father, how the experience shaped him and what it means for his future.  It was a very moving scene that I won’t soon forget.

Readers should be ready to feel uncomfortable, sad, and angry.  But it’s worth it for the reading experience.

The Sunday Salon: My May Book Stack

Welcome to May, everyone!  Between warmer weather, a garden that needs lots of attention, and new work responsibilities that tire me out during the week, my reading time has diminished and my reading mood is shifting toward lighter fare.  I’m excited about the books I have lined up this month and I can’t wait to share them with you.

Taking a closer look:

• .Life After Life, by Kate Atkinson: This is my current read and I am so, so excited about it.  I requested it from my library, and was something like #70 in queue.  After reading many excellent reviews from LibraryThing members, bloggers, and major media outlets like The Guardian and the New York Times, I caved and bought the Kindle edition.
• The Means of Escape, by Penelope Fitzgerald: Continuing with my short story project , this is my choice for May.
• A Glass of Blessings, by Barbara Pym: 2013 is Pym’s centenary year, and the LibraryThing Virago Group is reading one book each month.  I’m only reading the books I haven’t read before, and this is one of them.
• Queen Lucia, by E. F. Benson: this is one of the acquisitions mentioned last week, and this is the first in a series.  I understand they are comfort reads, and that sounds like just what the doctor ordered.
• A Single Man, by Christopher Isherwood:  I’ve had this on my stacks for some time, after friends heartily recommended it.  I’ve heard the film with Colin Firth is also good (is there anything starring Colin Firth that isn’t?), but I’d like to read the book first.

That’s probably as much as I will be able to manage in one month.  But I’ve thought ahead just in case.  If I find myself short of reading material, I’d like to read 2012 Booker Prize nominee The Lighthouse, by Alison Moore.  My library doesn’t have it, so I’d probably download it to my Kindle.

Have you read any of these books?  Share your thoughts in the comments!

What are you planning to read this month?

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The Sunday Salon: In Which I Fall of the Book Acquisition Wagon

I’ve been absent from the Salon for a few weeks now. Nothing’s wrong, I’ve just been busy with work, family, and the garden.  My last Salon post was a recap of my first quarter reading, in which I gloated over having read more books than I acquired in the first quarter of the year.  And then, in the space of a few weeks, I managed to completely blow that reading resolution.  I fell victim to a particularly potent combination of Paperbackswap and my Virago-reading friends on LibraryThing.

First, one Virago reader posted two books on Paperbackswap which happened to be on my wish list:

Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House and Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth — yippee!

As it happened, this same Virago reader was going through some serious house cleaning.  A few days later, four more Viragos became available.  These are lesser-known works (at least to me), but I’m not picky when it comes to Virago collecting.

Clash, Dust Falls on Eugene Schlumberger, Life Before Man, and The Grain of Truth

And then, for reasons I can’t really explain, I decided it was time for me to read E. F. Benson’s Mapp and Lucia series.  Paperbackswap  to the rescue again!

Queen Lucia (vol 1) and Lucia in London (vol 3)

I have to say that when these Moyer Bell editions arrived, I was smitten.  They are in mint condition and the covers are gorgeous.  I suddenly felt I had to have the complete set — they would look so pretty on my new bookshelves!  I promptly ordered volume 2 from Amazon (I have no restraint!), and wishlisted volumes 4-6 on Paperbackswap.

Oh, and I just happen to have 2 more Viragos on the way from Paperbackswap.  I can’t believe my luck!

That’s 11 books altogether, all in a few short weeks.  And I’ve read … erm … 4 books so far this month.  Oops, so much for that reading resolution!

But really, can you blame me?
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Short and Sweet: The Thing Around Your Neck, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Welcome to the April edition of Short & Sweet, my feature dedicated to short fiction.  This year I’ve worked my way through a pile of short stories, usually as bedtime reading.  This month I read The Thing Around Your Neck, by Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.  It’s been 5 years since I read her novels, and I needed an Adichie fix while waiting for her new book, Americanah, which will be released in the US in May.

This collection of twelve short stories begins in Nigeria, exploring contemporary life and the effects of the 1967 Biafran Civil War.  Later stories focus on immigration issues and life in the United States.  I was struck by Adichie’s ability to write a well-crafted and deep plot, with very real characters, all in 15-20 pages.  These stories hooked me within a few sentences — I really cared about the characters, to a degree that’s unusual for the short story form.  Some of the better stories included:

• Imitation – A woman living in the US with her children sees her husband only once a year.  When she learns he is having an affair back home in Nigeria, she takes an important step to change the situation.
• A Private Experience – A woman caught in a riot takes refuge in an abandoned shop and finds another woman there.  One is Igbo, the other Muslim, but they share a few hours of community and support each other through loss.
• The Thing Around Your Neck – in this immigration story, a Nigerian woman’s relationship with a white man creates cultural tension.

Adichie is better known for her novels, Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun; the latter won the Orange Prize (now Women’s Prize) for Fiction.  The Thing Around Your Neck demonstrates the broad range of her writing talent.

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Next month I’ll be reading The Means of Escape, by Penelope Fitzgerald. Watch for the next installment of Short & Sweet!

Review: The Misses Mallett, by E.H. Young

‘The Malletts don’t marry, Henrietta. Look at us, as happy as the day is long, with all the fun and none of the trouble.  We’ve been terrible flirts, Sophia and I.  Rose is different, but at least she hasn’t married. The three Miss Malletts of Nelson Lodge! Now there are four of us, and you must keep up our reputation.’ (p. 79)

And that’s the book, in a nutshell.  Caroline, Sophia, and their stepsister Rose are all unmarried women of a certain age, although Rose is several years younger and still considered attractive.  When their niece Henrietta comes to live with them, she upsets the gentle rhythm of spinsterhood.  These women have become very, very comfortable just being themselves:

Sitting up in bed looking grotesquely terrible, they discussed the event. Caroline, like Medusa, but with  hair curlers instead of snakes sprouting from her head, and Sophia with her heavy plait hanging over her shoulder and defying with its luxuriance the yellowness of her skin, they sat side by side, propped up with pillows, inured to the sight of each other in undress. (p. 32)

Hmm … perhaps they’re a little too comfortable!

Henrietta is young and has a mind of her own.  While she loves and admires her aunts, she has no intention of following in their footsteps.  And so she sets her sights on local heart-throb Francis Sales who, incidentally, has had a secret “thing” with Rose for some time.  And who, incidentally, is also married to an invalid confined to her bed.  Meanwhile Henrietta is being pursued by the dull but caring Charles Batty, a man who loves music, but can’t stand to attend concerts because other patrons whisper and crinkle their programs.  Rose attempts to resolve the conflict with Henrietta in many ways, all indirect because heaven forbid the situation be brought out into the open.  I found this infuriating, and lost patience with them more than once.

While Young’s social satire is amusing, autobiographical details add much interest to this story.  E. H. Young’s husband died at Ypres, and later she went to live with Ralph Henderson, a school headmaster, and his wife, who was a wife in name only.  They were inseparable, and while those in their social circle understood the situation, their relationship was not publicly acknowledged.  Young wrote The Misses Mallett when her living arrangement was still fairly new, and I can see how she used the experience to work through issues she must have wrestled with at the time.  Oh, how I wish she could have written more openly about that situation!

Review: The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby is commonly read in secondary school, but I missed out, and the upcoming film release was just the inspiration I needed to finally read it.  That, and a husband who read it about a month ago, and really wanted to discuss it.

The story is short, and seemingly straightforward.  Jay Gatsby is a wealthy man known for throwing huge, lavish parties on his Long Island estate.  His next-door neighbor, Nick Carraway, narrates the story and views Gatsby with a sort of detached awe.

I believe that on the first night I went to Gatsby’s house I was one of the few guests who had actually been invited. People were not invited — they went there.  They got into automobiles which bore them out to Long Island, and somehow they ended up at Gatsby’s door. Once there they were introduced by somebody who knew Gatsby, and after that they conducted themselves according to the rules of behavior associated with an amusement park. Sometimes they came and went without having met Gatsby at all, came for the party with a simplicity of heart that was its own ticket of admission. (p. 41)

Nick’s friends, Tom and Daisy Buchanan, are also new to Gatsby’s parties, but not new to wealth, being part of old, established Long Island “aristocracy.”  Gatsby himself maintains an aura of mystery.  No one knows much about his past, and speculation abounds: he’s a bootlegger, he killed a man, he served in the war, he went to Oxford … or perhaps not.  But he’s clearly “new money,” and Daisy and Gatsby have a shared past which becomes a central conflict in the novel.

The Great Gatsby is a tightly written work of only 180 pages.  Fitzgerald quickly immerses the reader in 1920s society, infuses his characters with a certain emotional desperation, and uses them to portray everything he felt was wrong with America during this period, especially greed and the quest for wealth.  None of the characters are particularly likeable, but to a great extent they are simply vessels for Fitzgerald’s message.  And despite being short on both character development and setting, Gatsby still feels complete, with a strong plot and thought-provoking themes.  I’m looking forward to the film to see how these themes are brought to life.

Addendum:  Claire @ Word by Word published a superb review of The Great Gatsby a day after mine.  Read it now! 

Review: The Dinner, by Herman Koch

Two Dutch couples meet for dinner in an expensive restaurant:  Paul and Claire, Paul’s brother Serge and his wife Babette.  Their meeting at first seems purely social, and something they do together from time to time.  But from minute details strategically placed in the narrative, the reader begins developing a different picture.  Just before leaving the house, Paul discovers disturbing content on his son Michel’s phone, but chooses not to mention it to Claire.  Paul detects signs of distress when Serge and Babette arrive at the restaurant.  We learn their son Rick was involved in a crime, as was Michel.  But what do the parents actually know?  What will they do about it?  And how did two boys from “good families” get into this situation?

Paul narrates the events of that evening, filling in family history along the way.  The result is a kind of cross between We Need to Talk About Kevin (troubled teens committing horrific acts) and The Reluctant Fundamentalist (disturbing scenes unfolding over a meal).  Neither family is what they seem at the outset.  Paul is an unreliable narrator, failing to see the damage resulting from his behavior over the years.

None of the characters are likeable; in fact, they are all pretty horrible.  And the story is unpleasant, too.  Normally that would be enough to make me hate a book.  Why didn’t that happen this time?  Because I was really intrigued by Koch’s writing.  I liked the way he meted out relevant details, first in tiny fragments and then in increasingly obvious chunks.  He deftly showed us not only the nature of the boys’ crime, but events that directly and indirectly made it possible, and made me question who really was the guilty party in this case.  The book was hard to put down and I finished it in just a couple of days; however, its dark, disturbing nature means it’s one I cannot recommend unequivocally.