Nora Webster (2014) By Colm Tóibín

Nora Webster is a brilliant novel about a woman’s odyssey from marriage to widowhood.

Set in Ireland, Colm Tóibín’s book details the life of Nora Webster after the death of her husband Matthew, a well-known and universally liked secondary school teacher. After years of being the "homemaker part of” a couple, Nora suddenly is thrust into an independence she’s never known or even sought. While still in mourning she finds herself head of household, responsible for all decisions for herself, and their four children. Her low self-confidence is almost crippling at first, but she realizes that immobility is not an option.

There are plenty of people willing to give her advice about her future, finances, the children’s education, the house, the car, getting a job, and multiple other issues. But she internally recoils when advice steps over the line to people telling her what to do, though she is careful to thank her friends and family for their helpful insights. Nora recognizes these topics are for her decisions, not theirs. But she doesn’t know how, nearly every decision in her adult life has been a joint one, made in discussion with Matthew, with the deference always going to him. That discussion is no longer there, and deference is not an option.

She meets all these challenges, often reluctantly, aware that family, friends, in fact everyone in their small town is scoring her. Her personal life, including her relationship with her children, changes over the first years. She will second guess every move, and feel guilty about any changes, until she realizes that changing is about growing, not repudiating.

None of the issues she will face are unique to Nora, they are faced by widows, and even widowers, everywhere. The sudden discovery that one is independent is relevant and similar to the end of any long-term relationship, where one has always been perceived as part of a couple, and then suddenly is a single.

Recommendation: Yes, it is an excellent read.

 

 

A Great Reckoning (2016) By Louise Penny

 

I have heard my niece talk about Louise Penny, an author I was not familiar with despite her appearances on the New York Times Best Seller List on multiple occasions. She is a mystery writer in Canada. So, when I came across A Great Reckoning at book fair last summer, I bought it.

After reading A Great Reckoning, I discovered it is book 12 of a 21- book series featuring Chief Inspector Armand Gamache. However, it reads comfortably as a stand-alone novel.

Gamache had been the head of Homicide at the Sûreté du Québec in Montreal – the provincial police département. In retirement, Gamache was living a quiet life in the rural Village of Three Pines, when he was asked to return to active service and take charge of the scandal plagued police training Academy where he had trained at the beginning of his career years ago. Feeling it a duty to help right the situation, he reluctantly agrees.

The challenges at the Academy include professors and their egos, cadets and their ambitions, and a need for a major restructuring and restaffing of the training program, not all of which would be received favorably. Add to that agenda a murder, and you have a mystery. The structure of the Academy reminds me -- in a good way -- of Hogwarts in the Harry Potter series.

While most of the story is set at the Academy, a significant portion of it take places in Three Pines, the town where Gamache and his wife live. It is a picturesque, mostly forgotten little village with an old restaurant/bistro; an all but abandoned Catholic Church; and several loveable, yet weird, neighbors (who I suspect are regulars in the full series).

When the owners of the bistro were renovating, they discovered an old map caught inside one of the original walls. The map will become an essential element of the story. The map subplot also provides an interesting history of map making.

Recommendation:  Yes. I will at some point read Book One. As for the other twenty, we will see.

Love Medicine (1984) By Louise Erdrich

 

The bargain shelf at a book store was not where I expected to find anything by author Louise Erdrich, but there it was, Love Medicine.

It was published in 1984, the first book of what has been a lengthy and successful writing career. Erdrich has won multiple book awards, including a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. I eagerly bought it because I wanted to see what her writing style was at its start, comparing it with a couple of her later works that I have read.

The simple but perfect prose was clearly there from the start. But the book structure was a challenge. Love Medicine has a huge cast of characters, with frequent narrator changes, and flashbacks that often cause confusion. By the time she wrote The Bingo Palace ten years later, she began to narrow her focus to main characters, which helped dramatically when it came to the complex plot of The Round House.

Which is not to say that the “lesser” characters had “lesser” stories. They had interesting personal testimonials, often tragic ones helping tell the stories of more modern-day Native Americans, particularly as they pertain to reservation life and discrimination in the country.

The book (the Harper Perennial edition) includes a chart/family tree which is mind-numbing, outlining “Catholic marriages,” “traditional Ojibwe marriages,” and “sexual liaisons,” not to mention the history of “take-ins” (informal foster adoptions). The individual stories of the people on the family tree are told non-sequentially, though they do tie together in a compelling conclusion. Overall, it was a complex and convincing first novel about what holds your life together through the challenge of living. It secured her place as a writer of significance.

Recommendation: You bet.

India in Mind (2005) edited by Pankaj Mishra

 

India in Mind is an anthology of excerpts, often whole chapters, of novels and poems written by major authors who have lived in or visited India. It is a literary sampling of the continent by, and mostly for, the non-Indian world.

The book is edited and introduced by Pankaj Mishra, a well-regarded Indian writer. Each selection includes a brief biography of its author drafted by Mishra and explains their connection to India. Included are chapters from such expected authors as E.M. Forster, Rudyard Kipling, Somerset Maugham; and the not so obvious Octavio Paz, Mark Twain, Gore Vidal, and even George Orwell; among others.

The works cover a variety of topics from travel difficulties, language barriers, the imperialism of the British Raj and the unwitting arrogance of its administrators, religion, animal population, marriage customs, and of course partition history. There is even a Journal selection from visitor Allen Ginsberg which is, true to form, incomprehensible.

One of the most thought-provoking excerpts is Desert Places by Australian author Robyn Davidson who talked about the Raban nomads of the desert region of western India and how the loss of such nomadic tribes would be unnoticed by the outside world.

Also of note is Jan Morris’ short essay titled Mrs. Gupta Never Rang about the capitol city of New Delhi.  George Orwell’s contribution from Shooting an Elephant is a phenomenal essay on what being a “Sahib” entails.

Paul Scott’s excerpt is The Jewel in the Crown, about the British Raj experience. I’ll read his book The Raj Quartet sometime in the future. I’ll also read the full version of The Great Railway Bazaar by Paul Theroux.

Mark Twain of course, brings in the humor, not disrespectful, but hilarious by telling of his experience when interviewing prospective “bearers” a.k.a. manservants, who did, and did not, know English.

Not to be outdone by the others, Gore Vidal goes deep into a discussion of nirvana with a wandering Budda.

Recommendation: Yes, this was a fun and informative literary sampling.

The Travels of Ibn Battutah (1958) edited by Tim MacKintosh-Smith

 

Abu Abdullah Muhammad Ibn Battutah was a legendary Berber explorer from the Maghrebi (western) region of North Africa. In the year 1325 at the age of twenty-one, having completed his education as a Qadi (Islamic legal scholar), Ibn Battutah set off from Tangier, Morocco to fulfill his Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca. He would not return home again until 1354.

After completing his pilgrimage Ibn Battutah then continued on to wander across much of the known world, as far east as China. The Travels of Ibn Battutah is an English translation of The Rihla, a travelogue of his journeys, dictated later in his life. Ibn Battutah’s travels were four times longer than those of Marco Polo, who traveled to China via the Silk Road from 1271 through 1295; and it would be over a century before Christopher Columbus would leave port in 1492. Importantly, both Polo’s and Columbus’ travels were for trade development purposes; Ibn Battutah’s travels were for personal exploration.

In addition to Ibn Battutah’s geographic explorations, his studies/observations of cultural differences are extensive. One will learn a great deal about Islam the religion and how it relates to the geo-politics of the time.

As the story progresses from one place to another, there are descriptions of day-to-day living, manner of dress, diet, family structure, variety of slavery situations, architecture – from mosques to cathedrals to shuls to Hindu & Buddhist temples -- agricultural economics, shipbuilding (this perhaps being the first western exposure to Chinese junks), diplomacy via marriage, diplomacy via tribute, and much more.

Places visited include Iberia, north & east Africa, Mali, Egypt, Jerusalem, Damascus, Constantinople, the Arab gulf states, Persia, Afghanistan, Turkestan, the Dihli Sultanate (Hindu India), Moslem India, Ceylon, the Maldives, Sumatra, and Canton.

Recommendation: This is not general reading, one needs to be a history buff and somewhat of a geek. The edition I bought is beautiful, gold leaf pages, tissue thin paper, 6 X 4 inches, miniscule font but extremely hard on the eyes. Go for larger font!

The Life We Bury (2014) By Allen Eskens

 

The Life We Bury is the debut novel published twelve years ago by writer Allen Eskens. He has been rather prolific since then, penning an additional ten novels mostly following the careers of various characters first introduced in the debut book.

Blogging on mystery books is always difficult because I don’t want to divulge the ending, and I will not with this book. That said …   

The main character in The Life We Bury is a college student at the University of Minnesota. His name is Joe Talbert and this semester he has a writing class. His assignment for the class is to write a biography of a living person – the premise being that every person’s life is an interesting story, whether they are a rock star or a house painter, and a good writer ought to be able to find that story. Running out of time to find an interview subject, and write the assignment, Joe goes to a nursing home in a last minute search of an interesting person.

The resident he settles on is a convicted rapist and murderer named Carl who has been transferred from prison to the nursing home for hospice care to live out the final two-three months of his life sentence before he dies from cancer. Believe me, this is by no means a Tuesdays with Morrie kind of story but is perhaps as compelling.

To prepare for the interview, Joe begins researching the court records and news clippings of the trial from 30 years ago. Informed, Joe meets with Carl, who denies the rape and the murder, but seems uninterested in clearing his name before his pending death. Joe thinks he’s guilty but continues his assignment.

Each step of the writing project takes Joe deeper into the case, to the point he begins to believe Carl is actually innocent.

There are a number of subplots that are vital to this story. One is Joe’s family situation, which consists of his alcoholic mother, and a brother with autism named Jeremy. Joe’s need to escape this environment for his own sanity by going away to college, is counter balanced by his overwhelming feeling of guilt for doing so, his pain is real. Inadvertently, Jeremy will play a critical role in the story. Another subplot of importance is Carl’s military service during the Vietnam “Conflict.”

Recommendation: Good read. I will read more of Eskens’ novels.

The Little House Books - Volume One (collection, 2012) By Laura Ingalls Wilder

 

In a quest for a return to simpler times Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the Little House series of American classics, seems to be having a resurgence. There were nine little house books in all, my winter reads the past few weeks have been the first four, Volume One of the Library of America’s collection of her works.

A key character in the semi-autobiographical books is a young girl named Laura and her life back in pioneer days of the country as the nation expanded west of the Mississippi River, times gone by in other words, though I’m not sure about the “simpler times” theme, other than to note they predate social media, plumbing and electricity.

The first of the novels is House in the Big Woods (written in 1932). In the story Laura is a young girl living on a farm in Wisconsin. The farm is in the stage of agriculture when “clearing” woods to make room for crops was a challenge, while hunting and trapping were the norm. It covers a one-year cycle on the farm reminding me of Aldo Leopold’s 1949 novel A Sand County Almanac which was also set in Wisconsin.

In the second novel, Farmer Boy (1933), Laura’s family is not part of the storyline, though it runs in parallel time. It’s about a young boy growing up on a farm in upstate New York. He will eventually set out on his own, moving west (think Manifest Destiny). He'll reappear in the later novels.

The third novel Little House on the Prairie (1935) is the best known of the novels. In it, Laura’s family will join the trek west relocating to Kansas, which at the time was “Indian Land” per treaty. They chose Kansas because it was treeless with rich soil and they had heard it was about to be opened up to pioneer settlers. Laura’s family along with many others, chose to arrive early and settle on it without legal standing before a new treaty had been negotiated – but it wasn’t their land to settle. Eventually the U.S. government had to evict them until such times as a new treaty was forced on the Natives.

The fourth novel, On the Banks of Plum Creek (1937) explains how Laura’s family, tired of moving, backtracked north to the State of Minnesota, near established towns founded by Norwegian immigrants to America, with such luxuries as stores, churches, and schools.

Written as childrens/young adult novels, the entire series offers folksy tales and could be used as a survivalist’s how-to guide for farming, log cabin building, and multiple other Farmer’s Almanac type information. Surprisingly, considering the time period of the novels, particularly the Little House on the Prairie, it includes different perspectives on the Native American “problem.” While total advocates of Manifest Destiny as the new nation’s birthright, Laura’s father provides at least an acknowledgement of the unfairness of the lopsided treaties formulated by Washington DC.

Wilder’s novels were the basis of the Little House on the Prairie hit television series spanning nine seasons for a total of two hundred episodes running from 1974 through 1983. It starred Melissa Gilbert as Laura with the role of her father being played by Michael Landon -- a.k.a. Little Joe of Bonanza, another hit television series from that time period. I wasn’t a Little House fan, but loved its genre equal, The Waltons.

Recommendation: Yes, they remain relevant as childrens/young adult books and are definitely necessary reads for students of American Literature.