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.

The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books (2014) By Azar Nafisi

For a variety of reasons, it has been a year since I’ve posted a review on my Blog.  Now, as I return to this avocation of mine, I want to lead off with a book extolling the virtues of literature, its importance to understanding the world, and which dove-tails nicely with one of my favorite niches, immigrant stories.

My recent reading habits have trended toward books set in other countries and cultures, and usually first published in languages other than English.  By accessing “their” literature, a window has opened to me on worlds I haven’t known.  With The Republic of Imagination, author Azar Nafisi has turned the tables, using American literature to gain a world view on the United States.  She has come to know us rather well, and she is now an American citizen.

Though you may not remember her name, you have probably heard of the author, or at least of her best-seller: Reading Lolita in Tehran.  She once was a professor of English Literature in her native Iran, until the Islamic Revolution convinced her it was time to leave. This new book discusses fiction as an antidote to that kind of rigid ideology, wherever in geography it may occur.  

With a subtitle of America in Three Books (she wanted 25, her editor said absolutely not), Nafisi discusses how a country’s literary classics can help shape peoples opinion of it.  While she covers the map -- or more aptly “the entire library” – she speaks in detail about three specific American classics:  The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain; Babbitt, by Sinclair Lewis; and The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, by Carson McCullers.  Huck Finn is clearly her favorite, though her epilogue includes her “current read” James Baldwin, zeroing in on my favorite book, his Another Country.

And when I say she speaks “in detail,” I mean it.  I rapidly discovered that even though he is endemic to America, and Americana, it’s been 50 years since I’ve read Huck.  It needs to jump to the front of my re-read list.  Babbitt is something I read a bit more recently; and The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is a work that I’ve never read – though I am familiar with McCullers’ groundbreaking Reflections in a Golden Eye.

The underlying essay of The Republic of Imagination is that these books are not going to provide you a textbook understanding of the country, they won’t help you pass a citizenship examine, and they aren’t even part of the “Common Core” (which she savages) any longer.  They will however help others understand the American character, or “psyche” if you will, and the emotional basis of America as geography, and how all of this plays to the rest of the world.

A point she repeatedly makes is that because these works of literature are about fictional people, they allow the reader, particularly the non-American reader, to use their imagination to shape what America must really be like, not what the powers that be – U.S or Iranian -- describe it as.  

She writes: “When Mark Twain wrote The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, there were still physical territories to light out to, but in twenty-first-century America, such uncharted terrain is part of fiction as well as fantasy.  The only way to light out, to see the ‘sivilized’ world through fresh eyes, is through our imaginations, our hearts and our minds …”

If you are a book worm, you’ll love this book.