Gone Girl (book 2012) By Gillian Flynn (movie 2014)

If ever one needed proof of the old adage “the book is always better" then Gone Girl is Exhibit-A, but more on that later.

 

A close friend of mine recommended I read Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn. I picked the book up a few days later, but then had a difficult time getting into it. The story begins with girl (Amy) meets boy (Nick), they date, fall in love, get married, have a wonderful life in New York – yawn, yawn, yawn. By page 75, I called my friend and told her I doubted I’d finish the book. She insisted I continue. I did.

 

Being careful not to provide a spoiler, a brief summary of Gone Girl is that after the marriage, things start to fall apart. Amy and Nick both lose their jobs. Her parents suffer a financial meltdown. His mother is diagnosed with cancer, and they move to his hometown in Missouri to care for her. 

   

Then Amy disappears, and the book turns into a complete page-turner.

 

The author, Gillian Flynn (a Chicagoan by-the-way), writes the book as a chapter narrated by Amy, alternating with a chapter narrated by Nick. The format works perfectly, hence the “two sides to every story” tag line.

Movie Trailer 

 
While the book works perfectly, the movie does not.

 

The problem with the movie isn’t with the actors. Rosamund Pike nails the Amy character. Lisa Banes who plays the minor role of Amy’s mother is superb, as is another minor character, Nick’s lawyer, played by Tyler Perry. The problem is with the character Nick, the male lead. More accurately, the problem is the movie’s director (David Fincher) totally left out an important aspect of Nick’s character: the fact that Nick rapidly learns to hold his own in this story. Ben Affleck’s portrayal of Nick is okay, but it’s difficult to turn in an award winning performance when the director doesn’t understand the storyline.

 
An additional problem is that the back and forth, and numerous diary flashbacks, that work so well in the book, are confusing in the movie.
 

In the director’s defense, there is a lot of material in Flynn’s book. Even with a movie that is 2 hours and 29 minutes long, much of the story (both characters and settings) had to be cut, making for some very difficult decisions. The biggest loss among the things cut or downplayed was a more in-depth treatment of the Missouri town where the story takes place. Fincher’s interpretation of the town folk as rubes is shallow and just plain wrong.

 

And returning to that old adage: skip the movie, read the book.

 

The Big Sky (1947) By A. B. Guthrie, Jr.

Some of my favorite vacations were trips to or through Montana, the "Big Sky" country. The first included a 3-day train ride on the Empire Builder from Chicago, up to Minneapolis, and then across the northern plains to Seattle. On that trip I discovered just how vast and varied the plains are, desolate yet breathtaking. On another, I flew into Helena on a puddle-jumper plane, and then put nearly 2,000 miles on a rental car over a two-week period. My most recent trip to the area involved taking the Amtrak to Minot, North Dakota and then exploring the western part of that state and the eastern wheat fields of Montana. What can I say, give me a map, or not, and I'm off.
 
I attribute this fascination with the plains to the bi-centennial celebration in 2004 of the Lewis & Clark Expedition (1804-1806) commissioned by President Thomas Jefferson to explore the land acquired through the Louisiana Purchase -- little of which was part of present day Louisiana, and none of which was France's to sell. Undaunted Courage by Stephen Ambrose, about the Expedition, was one of my more pleasurable reads (controversial, not a "literary classic," but a pleasurable read all the same). His book literally provided the path for my vacations. But, his book ends shortly after the Expedition concludes. What happened next? 
 
An answer was offered by another author, A. B Guthrie Jr., who penned The Big Sky, which was the first of what would be six novels, dubbed The Big Sky Series.  The others books in the series are The Way West, Fair Land Fair Land, These Thousand Hills, Arfive, and The Last Valley, classics in the genre of westerns -- both books and movies.  Guthrie won the 1950 Pulitzer Prize for The Way West.
 
The Big Sky begins in 1830, 24 years after the Lewis & Clark Expedition has been completed. Word about the great natural beauty and wealth of the plains as documented by the explorers is raging across the still young United States, but settlement is technically not allowed. Still hunters, aka "Mountain Men," are making their way west. 

Into this setting enters Boone Caudill, a teenager whose life will become witness to what will eventually be known as Manifest Destiny. Caudill heads west, leaving Kentucky, which has become settled and no longer personifies the frontier. His exploits cover the entire route of the Lewis & Clark Expedition. He makes his living as a hunter, observing first hand the impact of over-hunting on both beaver commodity prices, and on the livelihood of the Native peoples. He will eventually marry a Native American woman and adopt, for awhile, an Indian way of life. Near the end of the book his personal life has begun to unravel, as his natural restlessness sets in.
 
Recommendations?  If one is a history buff, or a fan of westerns, you will enjoy this book. And yes, I've already added The Way West to my reading list. But let me issue a warning: this book was published in 1947, well before concerns about politically correct language entered the world.

If I Die in Juarez (2008) By Stella Pope Duarte

Over the past few months I have been following a horrendous news story concerning the ambush and disappearance of 43 students from the lawless town of Iguala in the state of Guerrero in southern Mexico. Last week independent Austrian authorities were able to do a DNA match to one of the students using bone fragments buried in a remote area, confirming a belief that the students have been executed. Notorious drug cartels and their puppets in government are the prime suspects, though predictably, no one saw anything. This type of news story is hardly restricted to Mexico, being recent history in both Chile and Argentina, and in fact throughout world history.

The chilling nature of this news reminded me that a few years ago I purchased a book about the systemic rape, murder and mutilation of hundreds of young women in Juarez, Mexico – again, the suspects include the drug cartels, with police and government collusion and protection. After buying the non-fiction book, I could not bring myself to read it. I finally read it this week.  

If I Die in Juarez, by Stella Pope Duarte, is beautifully written, but not at all a pleasant read. 

 

I’ve read and reviewed two of Duarte’s books before: Let Their Spirits Dance is a heart-wrenching, yet heart-warming, story about the Ramirez family from Phoenix, Arizona making a pilgrimage to see the name of their son/brother/friend on the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington DC; and Women Who Live in Coffee Shops is a short story collection about the lives of poor people living on the south side of Phoenix.  In both books, Duarte proves she is a masterful storyteller.    

Duarte uses those writing skills to tell the world the horror that is the topic of If I Die in Juarez. When I first read about these awful events in newspaper reports, I only saw the statistics, and after awhile one becomes quite numb to them. To overcome that lack of focus, Duarte pulled the statistics down to the individual level, humanizing the inhuman.

She informs the reader about these atrocities (coined as “feminicidio” or “feminicide”) by telling the story of several people who migrated to Jaurez, a border town in the state of Chihuahua, across the river from El Paso, Texas. They came for a variety of reasons, but mainly to seek work at the “maquiladoras” – American controlled factories built just inside the border of Mexico after the ratification of NAFTA, they were created virtually overnight to take advantage of cheaper, non-union labor. The social impact of this rapid feudal-industrialization has been profound, but cannot be called progress. The migrants were originally from rural villages throughout Mexico, poor and poorly educated, ripe for exploitation.
  
While the victims are numerous, so too are the perpetrators: pathologic machismo men, both Mexican and American; corporate officials; pimps, prostitutes and johns; politicians and police; drug users and drug dealers; and even do-gooders.

Yet, the most alarming aspect of this entire story is the institutionalized silence.

The heroes of the story -- who are primarily heroines -- are few, yet grow in number as they quickly realize they are being pillaged by everyone, considered expendable by all. As in Chile, Argentina and elsewhere, it is the families of the dead or missing who are rising up, demanding action. The book ends with the history of the founding of Mujeres Unidas de Juarez (United Mothers of Juarez), an organization that demands its government work for the people, not the cartels. It serves as a model for many groups, including the families of the missing students in Iguala. 

The Angel's Game (Spanish 2008, English 2009) By Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Carlos Ruiz Zafon's novel The Angel's Game takes us back to his gothic creation The Cemetery of Forgetten Books. It's an eerie read.

His previous novel, The Shadow of the Wind, introduced us to the underside of Barcelona, telling us of a young man’s initiation into The Cemetery of Forgotten Books, a depository of all things sacred in literature, with an exclusive membership. The Cemetery is a book lover’s Heaven, with a direct connection to a tormented private Hell.
 

Continuing with The Cemetery's theme, The Angel’s Game leads us down the path with David Martin, an aspiring writer who begins his career in Barcelona, circa 1917, as a cub reporter at a fading newspaper, The Voice of Industry. He eventually is allowed to write a fictional crime story for the paper, which turns into a highly popular weekly serialization.
 

Success, as it is called, comes when Martin is approached by representatives of an unnamed third-party (The Angel) offering to underwrite his career … with some strings attached. He accepts, but then finds himself strangled and terrified by the strings, and develops severe writers’ block, further compromising his predicament. To help, an unlikely mentor, the editor/publisher of The Voice of Industry, sponsors his membership in The Cemetery of Forgotten Books.
 

It is difficult to say more about this book without issuing a “spoiler alert,” so I won’t. But it has it all: a gothic mansion, a presence from beyond, murders, revenge, police department collusion, and a love triangle.
 

The Angel’s Game is every bit as good as its pilot The Shadow of the Wind, and the second of what one hopes is an Anne Rice style series of novels. Reading these in sequence is probably helpful, but not necessary.

South of Superior (2011) By Ellen Airgood

Having entered the winter season, let me recommend South of Superior by Ellen Airgood, as the perfect hot chocolate and fireplace read; or if you prefer another season, the perfect book to read on the dock or in the shade of an oak tree, on a hot summer day.   

The novel is set in the town of McAllaster on the south shore of Lake Superior, in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.  It’s the type of town people from Chicago, Milwaukee, Green Bay, and other larger Midwestern cities flock to during the summer.  The truly adventurous ones return with snowmobiles and go ice-fishing during the winter.  But the book is not about them, it is about McAllaster’s year-round residents, people who have lived in the town all their lives.

Their story is told through the eyes of Madeline Stone, a native, who was abandoned by her mother and given up by her grandfather at age three, to be raised by a dear family friend named Emmy in far away Chicago.  As the book begins, Madeline is still emotionally exhausted from caring for Emmy, the only person who has ever cared for her, who has recently died of cancer.  How Madeline returns to McAllaster as an adult is a bit implausible as a storyline, but it works.  She had no intention of doing so, holding a lifelong bitterness toward her deceased grandfather, resentful over the family life she never had.

Then one day a letter arrives from a woman named Gladys, who she knows only as someone who had lived with her grandfather.  Gladys, knowing that Madeline had cared for Emmy through her illness, asks that Madeline return to McAllaster to help care for Gladys’ sister Butte.   The sisters are elderly, and Gladys is not able to handle the physical demands of care-giving for Butte.  

  

Unhappy with her current situation, Madeline moves “home” to a town she does not know, taking her bitterness with her.  The rest of the novel tells how she comes to know its people, and starts to understand how it was she was given away as a child.

To describe the book in shorthand, it is a cross between The Waltons and This Old House. [I know it doesn’t fit my image, but I’m a major Waltons fan.]  The book is as heartwarming as you will find in current literature; an excellent read.

The Garden of Evening Mists (2012) By Tan Twan Eng

In my Blog post from May of 2013, I raved about a book titled The Gift of Rain by Tan Twan Eng.  It is an exquisite work, and was a critical success -- an unlikely outcome for a first novel.  Like everyone else, I wondered if he’d be able to repeat his good fortune.  With The Garden of Evening Mists he amazingly accomplishes this fete, crafting a novel reading so beautifully that it seems effortless.

I’m not going to go so far as to call this formula writing, but much of the plot construction looks strikingly familiar.  The book is set in the central Highlands of the Malaya peninsula several years after World War II.  It has two primary characters and the story is built around their intense yet unexpected relationship.

The narrative is provided by a woman named Yun Ling Teoh, who with her sister, spent most of the war imprisoned by the Japanese in a camp hidden deep in the mountains.  After the war she embarks on a legal career, attaining a judgeship, with a record that includes service on the country’s war crimes tribunal in the capital.  As she retires from the Court, she returns to her native highlands with the desire to build a memorial garden honoring her sister who did not survive the camp.  

Once home, her goal is to enlist the help of a man named Aritomo to build the garden.  He is a reclusive Japanese national who once served as the gardener to the Emperor of Japan, before his self-exile to the then British Colony of Malaya.  A mysterious figure throughout the novel, Aritomo is the master gardener/creator of Yugiri [evening mists], a private, estate-size, Japanese Garden.   The relationship that develops between Aritomo and Judge Teoh is fascinating and is played out in war-time memories and the present day, with an ongoing Communist insurgency based in the surrounding jungles playing as a backdrop throughout the novel.

Teoh’s remembrance of meeting Aritomo makes clear their innate relationship which is at the core of the novel:

 

"He did not apologize for what his countrymen had done to my sister and me.  Not on that  rain-scratched morning when we first met, not at any other time.  What words could have healed my pain, returned my sister to me?  None.  And he understood that.  Not many people did."

Because the storyline involves a Japanese Garden, the ability to describe the scenery in prose that is visual is critical.  It is rare that books are written that succeed at this.  The Garden of Evening Mists is one of them, and it is Tan Twan Eng’s second such book.