They flew open planes of wood through clear blue as well as dense grey skies; through howling winds, tempests, and snowstorms that left them drenched and freezing. Continue reading Flight, Saint-Exupéry And Friends:The Prince of the Skies by Antonio Iturbe
Crime or legal thrillers, which I rarely read, are written to be exciting and to keep you the reader guessing who the perpetrator is or, if she’s identified early in the story, whether she is in fact guilty. Crime thriller, I think, is one genre in which the plot is primary. Characterization may not be well-rounded and it focuses on what motivates a crime. How … Continue reading On the Footsteps of Rashomon: A Nearly Normal Family by M.T. Edvardsson
The title is a line from a 17th-century poem that evokes the beauty and romance of Afghanistan. It seems to conflict with what happens in the story. Continue reading Affection Nurtured by Common Suffering: A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
The Overstory—I didn’t know for sure what the title alluded to when I first encountered this novel by Richard Powers. I interpreted it in terms of the usual conventions about books, especially fiction. I guessed “overstory” referred to an overarching theme, the most important one that subsumes some more obvious sub-themes. You, the reader, must venture into the depths of a multilayered story to tie … Continue reading Nature as Main Character in Fiction: 2. The Overstory
Writers write books. They also write about books—reviews, literary analysis, how-to manuals. And, of course, fiction. Fiction about books often deal with our relationship to books or what they mean to us. The book, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows, is one such novel. Set shortly after World War II, Juliet Ashton, a journalist living in … Continue reading A Delight: The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. Most likely a crime thriller or a murder mystery, right? That’s how some reviews have perceived this novel, including one put out as “the Amazon review” of this Amazon Best Book of August 2019. Maybe advertising the book this way helps sell more copies. But I think doing so does the novel a disservice. It is, … Continue reading Nature as Main Character in Fiction: 1. Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
I’m not particularly enamored of war fiction though my number one favorite these past few years is one (Anthony Doerr’s Pulitzer prize-winning All the Light We Cannot See). But an audiobook of Kristin Hannah’s The Nightingale was available to borrow on Libby and I was curious about a novel that merited a 4.8 rating from more than 30,000 Amazon readers. And since I had some … Continue reading War Heroes: The Nightingale and The Paris Architect
I just read three books in an hour. True, they’re short kid-length books. An epistolary trilogy whose essence I’m at a loss to fully capture. All I can say is the Griffin and Sabine Trilogy by Nick Bantock is a joy to read. Yet, it’s also sad, hopeful, poignant. And so achingly human. I’ll treasure it and read it many times. The main story that … Continue reading Books As Art: Nick Bantock’s Griffin and Sabine Trilogy
Ever heard of sensation novels? No? Me, neither until I met A Woman in White by Wilkie Collins, published in 1859. For the most part I listened, rather than read the book, courtesy of Librivox.org. I’ve sampled many audiobooks at this site and I take my hats off to volunteers who’ve dedicated precious time and energy to bring classic literature to people who prefer to … Continue reading A Sensation of the Victorian Age: Wilkie Collins’ A Woman in White
L’Assommoir is a veritable tearjerker. The saddest women’s fiction ever. Emile Zola, in Book #7 of his Rougon-Macquart cycle directs his Victorian male gaze on Gervaise, sister of Lisa and the female protagonist of The Belly of Paris (third book in the cycle). But Zola’s gaze, as you might expect, is neither fleeting nor superficial. His perception is filtered through the viewpoint of “literary naturalism.” … Continue reading Emile Zola’s Uncompromizing Victorian Male Gaze: L’Assommoir (The Dram Shop)
Have you read Love In The Time Of Cholera? Have you been as enchanted by it as so many people and big reviewers seem to have been? The Christian Science Monitor thinks it’s boldly romantic, profoundly imaginative, fully imagined work of fiction that expands our sense of life’s infinite possibilities. I don’t quite grasp the difference between “profoudly imaginative” and “fully imagined” but “life’s infinite … Continue reading My Feminist Sensibility vs. Love In The Time Of Cholera
MANY YEARS LATER as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. At that time Macondo was a village of twenty adobe houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs. The world … Continue reading One Hundred Years of Solitude: A Literary Chameleon About Life
Without a doubt, Like Water for Chocolate is a tasty read. It opens with the ingredients for Christmas Rolls, Mexican style. But it goes beyond the usual food in fiction novel. A little further down, it reads: Tita was literally washed into this world on a great tide of tears that spilled over the edge of the table and flooded across the kitchen floor. That … Continue reading Diving Into Magical Realism: Two Morsels
Why Emile Zola’s title has been translated as The Masterpiece isn’t very clear to me. Literally, l’œuvre means “the work;” “masterpiece is “chef d’œuvre.” Zola’s main character, artist Claude Lantier, actually fails to produce a masterpiece. It isn’t even obvious that Claude thinks of the large piece he’s been working on as a potential chef d’œuvre. He is obsessed by it—that’s clear enough. But as … Continue reading Emile Zola’s L’Œuvre (The Masterpiece): Fine Line Between Artistic Genius and Mental Illness?
Les Halles in Paris—do you know it? Unless you’re into a bit of French history, you may not. It doesn’t exist anymore, demolished in 1969/70, its centennial year. It was a huge market, much of it housed in at least ten pavilions of glass and iron designed by Victor Baltard. Plus a big domed central pavilion that later became the Bourse de Commerce, the French … Continue reading Emile Zola’s The Belly of Paris: Celebration of Food or Satire?
Disbelief. That’s my initial reaction as I follow the life of orphan master’s son, Jun Do, in Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son, winner of the 2013 Pulitzer Prize. Is this really what life is like in North Korea? Lives subjected to unrelenting propaganda from its one radio station, and unrelenting trauma, probably almost from birth if you’re an orphan? As he grows up, Jun … Continue reading Adam Johnson’s North Korea: Fiction as Trauma Narrative
“War is nasty; war is fun, War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead.” Harvard University President Drew Faust borrows this quote to illustrate that war fascinates because it is a paradox. The remark actually comes from Vietnam veteran Tim O’Brien about the “awful majesty of combat.” For films and books, war is a readymade but challenging setting … Continue reading War Stories: Why they may be worth your time
A story of a woman full of angst. A woman whom modern, educated women can relate to. But only to some extent. Meredith Ruth (MR) Neukirchen is the first woman president of an Ivy League university. That alone makes her totally unique. She’s achieved the pinnacle, a plum usually denied women, even those with her background and ambition. But what’s more remarkable about MR is … Continue reading Joyce Carol Oates—Mudwoman
How much of life is made up of coincidences? And is coincidence Fate? Or is it Chance? I think these questions are at the heart of Antoine Laurain’s novel, The Red Notebook. When a guy called Laurent finds a discarded stolen bag on top of a bin, a bag that he later learns belongs to a woman named Laure—is that fate or chance? On the … Continue reading Fate in Fiction: Antoine Laurain’s The Red Notebook
I picked up the Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway because of my interest in music. But I find that it’s more like a meditation on the senselessness of war than a story on some theme regarding the power of music. The novel has no clear beginning, middle and end. Maybe, that’s how it should be. The story happens during a real war, when Sarajevo … Continue reading The Cellist of Sarajevo’s Tribute to Victims of Ethnic Hatred
Escape Into Reality 