“Sometimes we find our true and inherent selves during youth. It is a recognition of something that at first is small within us, that we will grow into somehow. My shipboard nickname was MYNAH.  Almost my name but with a step into the air and a glimpse of some extra thing, like a slight swivel in their walk all birds have when they travel by land.”

Book Review:

Review by Friederike Knabe  (OCT 5, 2011)

In his new novel, The Cat’s Table, Michael Ondaatje imagines a young boy’s three-week sea voyage across the oceans, from his home in Colombo, Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) to England. The eleven-year-old travels alone and is, not surprisingly, allocated to the “lowly” Cat’s Table, where he joins an odd assortment of adults and two other boys of similar age.

In the voice of young “Michael,” Ondaatje shares the boys’ adventures on the ship with charming immediacy, while an older, adult “Michael” looks over his shoulder, first hardly noticeable, and later, more and more directly reflecting on his own recollections and moving the story forward. Are we reading a childhood memoir of sorts, a coming-of-age story, a personal journey into the past? Are we reading fact or fiction? Maybe, all of it. The parallels to the author’s life are easily spotted: a childhood in Ceylon, a nineteen fifties journey by ship from there to England… Other parallels to the author’s life come into view in the course of the book. Also, Ondaatje suggests in the first pages: “I try to imagine who the boy on the ship was…” In the Author’s Note (at the end of the book) Ondaatje is as clear and opaque as can be: “Although the novel uses the colouring and locations of memoir and autobiography, The Cat’s Table is fictional – from the Captain and crew and all its passengers on the boat – to the narrator.” Still…

Young Michael and his two new friends, Cassius and Ramadhin, become soon inseparable; yet, their friendship does not extend to sharing much about their backgrounds, so we don’t know more about them either at this point. They freely roam the huge ship, exploring any nook and cranny they can get into, especially during nights. Cassius is the rambunctious, Ramadhin, the cautious, more reasonable one, conscious of his “weak heart.” Michael describes himself as a “follower.”

The men at the Cat’s Table, astutely observed by young Michael, while distinct in personality and behaviour, share, nonetheless, their curiosity for the happenings on the ship – one could call theirs “the gossip table” – and, more importantly, they each provide some kind of “life lesson” for the boys, be it in history, music, literature or biology. The most intriguing passenger at the table, however, is Miss Lasqueti, who appears to have insider knowledge of a very different kind. From time to time, they are joined by seventeen-year-old, beautiful and “mysterious” Emily, a distant cousin of Michael’s. Given her “higher social standing” and her placement in the dining room, she can contribute intriguing news for any evolving “story.” She knows, for example, much about the dangerous, heavily guarded, prisoner, who the boys have noticed during their nighttime adventures. Of course, Emily also has her secret encounters at night, overheard by Michael hiding in a lifeboat…

For the first half or so of the novel, I am simply charmed by the descriptions of the boys’ hilarious or risky escapades on the ship as it moves across the Indian Ocean towards the Suez Canal. We explore the ship’s “world” through a child’s eyes. The episodes, told more like independent vignettes than in a contiguous narrative, succeed, nonetheless, in carrying our curiosity forward: they capture the atmosphere on ship, provide personality capsules of passengers or crew, and details of their various activities. Once closer to land, we are offered glimpses into the varying landscapes and port cities. While Michael’s journey is depicted with gentleness and often lyrical descriptions, something seems to be missing in terms of the story’s overall meaning and depth – at least for me. But soon enough, like entering a new section in the book, the voice of the adult Michael takes on a more prominent role. He drops hints how different episodes or people might be connected; he starts asking questions about the veracity of what we have been told, pondering the reliability of his long-term memory…

And, most engagingly, Ondaatje, while continuing to remain within the overall three-week time span of the journey, now leaves it with ease to reveal aspects of past and future of several of the central characters. These mental excursions – relating to Emily, Miss Lasqueti, Ramadhin, etc. and, last but not least, the prisoner – help us fill in gaps within earlier descriptions of episodes during the voyage. They also add an integrating layer to the narrative that I had been hoping for. Finally, they bring us also closer to the adult Michael. It is only later in life that he realizes the journey’s importance as “a rite of passage;” a journey that formed him in more ways than he has acknowledged for a long time. In hindsight he can give voice to an emotion that he experienced then and many times since as he grew into an adult as “a desire that is a mixture of thrill and vertigo.” Emily, when he meets her again, much later, has the better phrase for what affected them: “We all became adults before we were adults.”

In the end, it does not matter anymore – at least to me – whether this book is a novel or a memoir/autobiography. It is a beautifully rendered story of growing up and living with the memories of youth. The novel’s language, the tone, the images and the tender approach to his subject suggest that this is probably Ondaatje’s most personal and intimate novel in many years.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 46 readers
PUBLISHER:	Knopf (October 4, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Friederike Knabe
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Michael Ondaatje
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh Star of the Sea by Joseph O’Connor

Bibliography:

• Coming Through the Slaughter (1976)
• In the Skin of a Lion (1987)
• The English Patient (1992)
• Anil’s Ghost (2000)
• Divisadero (2007)
• The Cat’s Table (October 2011)

Nonfiction:

• Running in the Family (1982)
• The Conversation with Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film (2002)

Poetry:

• The Cinnamon Peeler (1991)
• Handwriting (1999)

Movies from books:

• The English Patient (1996)

“It was time it happened, the determination that this should never be allowed to repeat itself, the hatred and the bitterness of not being able to decide whether to thrust a knife in her or start to weep so that she could console me like a second Linda, for I was no child any more and yet I was, and I wanted to be neither, but someone else, again.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (SEP 28, 2011)

Navigating that shaky bridge between childhood and adulthood is never easy, particularly in 1961 – a time when “men became boys and housewives women,” a year when Yuri Gargarin is poised to conquer space and when the world is on the cusp of change.

Into this moment of time, Norwegian author Roy Jacobsen shines a laser light on young Finn and his mother Gerd, who live in the projects of Oslo. Fate has not been kind to them: Gerd’s husband, a crane operator, divorced her and then died in an accident, leaving the family in a financially precarious position. To make ends meet, she works in a shoe store and runs an ad for a lodger for extra money.

To complicate the situation, Finn’s father’s second wife – a now-widowed drug addict – views the ad and unloads on the family Finn’s half-sister, Linda – a young girl who appears to have mysterious problems that are only gradually revealed. Figuratively, this “poor mite got off the Grorud bus one dark November day with an atomic bomb in a small light blue suitcase and turned our lives upside down.”

Linda becomes the mirror in which Gerd, Finn, and others (including the lodger Kristian) eventually define themselves. Gerd, who identifies strongly with Linda, is transported back to an abusive childhood and views herself in the little girl. Finn — who is the first-person narrator — battles jealousy, bewilderment, and eventually, stirrings of love as he defends Linda from the Norwegian educational system and the school bullies. He reminisces: “Linda was not of this world, one day I would come to understand this – she was a Martian come down to earth to speak in tongues to heathens, to speak French to Norwegians and Russian to Americans. She was destiny, beauty and a catastrophe. A bit of everything. Mother’s mirror and Mother’s childhood. All over again.”

Not unlike his regional compatriot, Per Petterson, Roy Jacobsen is (as one publication stated about the latter), “a master at writing the spaces between people.” He succinctly and beautifully captures the incomprehension of a young boy who is trying to make sense of the adult world and his place within it. The increasing bond between the boy and his accidental sister is explored painstakingly and is exquisitely poignant. The portrayal of Linda’s evolution to her new family is genuinely heartrendering.

A pedestrian and at times downright awkward translation does not serve the stream of consciousness sections well. In the best translations (such as the talented Ann Born’s translation of Per Petterson’s Out Stealing Horses), the reader loses sight that the book is a translation. It takes a little while to get into the cadence and the rhythm.

But the authenticity of Roy Jacobsen’s vision wins out with its universal themes: how others become gifts in our lives, unveiling us, and the lengths we go to preserve relationships with those we love. Or, in the words of the author, “Something happens to you when someone spots you – you see yourself from the outside, your own peculiar strangeness, that which is only you and moves in only you, but which nonetheless you have not known…” This quiet book is a hopeful testimony to transformative change.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 7 readers
PUBLISHER:	Graywolf Press (September 27, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Roy Jacobsen
EXTRAS:	Blog with all sorts of Roy Jacobsen info
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Out Stealing Horses by Per Pettersen

Partial Bibliography (translated):

• The New Water (1987; 1997 in English)
• The Burnt-Out Town of Miracles (2005; 2009 in English)
• Child Wonder (2009; September 2011 in English)

“We’re never gonna escape this,” Paps said. “Never.”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte  (SEP 22, 2011)

We The Animals in this wonderful debut novel refers to three brothers, close in age, growing up in upstate New York. They are the Three Musketeers bound strongly together not just because of geographical isolation but because of cultural separateness too. The brothers are born to a white mother and a Puerto Rican father—they are half-breeds confused about their identity and constrained by desperate and mind-numbing poverty.

This wild and ferocious debut is narrated by the youngest of the three, now grown, looking back on his childhood. It’s a coming-of-age story told in lyrical sentences that are exquisitely crafted. And while there are many moments of beauty in here, there are also ones of searing violence.

The boys can do nothing but stand back and watch as the intensely abusive relationship between the parents plays out everyday and it’s almost worse because the evidence creeps up after the fact. One day, Mom’s eyes are swollen shut and cheeks turned purple “He told us the dentist had been punching on her after she went under; he said that’s how they loosen up the teeth before they rip them out,” the narrator, barely aged seven, recalls. The severe abuse is compounded and made even more heartbreaking by the boys’ innocence and gullibility—they buy this lie and many others, whole.

The daily struggle for survival is heart wrenching yet without melodrama. “We stayed at the table for another forty-five minutes, running our fingers around our empty bowls, pressing our thumb tips into the cracker plate and licking the crumbs off,” Torres writes about one of the many evenings when one can of soup and a few crackers would have to make do for all of them. The boys don’t quite understand why their parents are seemingly happy one moment and why their mother slips into deep bouts of depression the next.

One of the many beautiful chapters in the book is one called “Night Watch” (each short chapter in this slim volume has a name). In it, the boys accompany Dad to work when he finds work at a night job. They have to sleep on the floor in sleeping bags in front of the vending machines, out of plain sight. They are here (and not home) because Mom is at her job working the night shift at a local brewery. The next morning, when a white man comes to relieve Dad of his duties, he spots the three musketeers and can guess at the situation. From the argument that follows, the boys already know that Dad has probably lost this job too. The family’s otherness, especially as perceived by the boys, is just beautifully rendered here.

As the boys enter adolescence, the narrator immediately knows he is separate and apart from his brothers. “They smelled my difference—my sharp, sad, pansy scent,” Torres writes. It wouldn’t be a reveal to say that the difference lies in the narrator’s sexuality, which can be glimpsed early on, if one pays close attention.

In a recent interview, the author Justin Torres has said: “I think that everybody struggles with family in some way and I hope that they can come away realizing that you can go back to those experiences and find something beautiful in everything and that you can make art out of your experiences.” With We The Animals, Torres has crafted just that—a beautiful and memorable work of art. This slender novel packs a powerful punch.

Justin Torres proves you don’t have to pen a giant volume to write precociously about huge themes such as family, race, adolescence and sexuality. Of course Torres writes so beautifully that you almost wish that he did.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 49 readers
PUBLISHER:	Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1 edition (August 30, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	An interview with Justin Torres
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

Bibliography:

• We the Animals (August 2011)

“Her eyes came open. Fully open. But she could no longer see the Abyssinian mountain that the Sabbath sun had turned like fire…
She could no longer see anything. She was blind.
For a long and disconcerting moment, she did not know who she was or where she was.  Only five to eight seconds later did she begin to realize that she had been dreaming.”

Book Review:

Review by Friederike Knabe  (SEP 10, 2011)

Makeda is the title character of Randall Robinson’s astounding, thought provoking, and highly engaging novel. A blind retired “laundress,” Makeda’s life is anchored in her tiny, often sun-filled, parlour in Richmond, Virginia. Her modest circumstances, after a life of hardship, stand in stark contrast to her appearance and demeanor: at home, at church and in the market, she is usually clad in richly embroidered beautiful African gowns and she radiates wisdom and emotional strength, instilling respect wherever she goes. Some unknown visitors leave gifts for her, or speak to her as if she were somebody else…

Often, when she lifts her unseeing eyes toward the sun, her posture and diction change: she appears to have moved from one instant to the next – like a time traveller – into a far away place. She dreams “in pictures – color pictures, pictures of people, pictures of odd places – though she had never in her life seen a human soul…” she tells Gray, her youngest grandson, later. Recalling her dreams in great detail, she will only allow Gray, her “spirit child,” to share her secrets. “I remember at that point she said to me: Things are almost never what you, with your two eyes, can see them being. Sometimes they are less, but most of the time they are more. Worlds and worlds more, son.”

Makeda’s dreams, the “special ones,” take her to different places in Africa, regions that all have a special spiritual connection to African-American history. The dream stories are so vividly told, and, with each recurrence, grow in such intricate detail, that they pull the reader into those past lives just as much as Gray, letting us forget that it may be “just a dream.” Or is it? Is there more to it? Makeda knows where she has been and who she is in her dreams; did these places really exist at some time in the past? Is there surviving evidence of them today? Why those places and not others? What are the connections of those people to her own life and time? Many questions occupy her mind. Her curiosity grows to the point that she, after warning her grandson not to share his knowledge with anybody, instructs him to investigate any factual bases of what she tells him. Especially the amazing story of the Dogon people in Mali, West Africa, fascinates both: Dogon cosmology claims to have known about Sirius and his three stars hundreds or, maybe, thousands of years before science could prove their claim. Gray, by then a college student, will have to find a way to make this journey for his grandmother, and as it turns out, also for himself.

Robinson, recognized for his extensive non-fiction writing on topics that range from African-American socio-politics to international human rights, ventures with Makeda beyond any confines of a more traditional novel. The very moving account of Gray’s coming-of-age journey, the depiction of his close ties to his grandmother, set against the backdrop of the family’s difficult circumstances in nineteen fifties and sixties, represent by themselves a richly rewarding story. Yet, Makeda’s dream travels are more than a key for Gray’s own journey in search for identity and, eventual, love. They are like virtual spiritual doors that Robinson opens that lead us into his multi-layered vision of a broad-based African-American identity that, while recognizing its contemporary challenges, is intimately connecting it back to its African roots and its African historical and spiritual heritage.

To expand on his theme, the author introduces fictional and existing expert voices that speak to the young people in Gray’s college environment. For many students and readers, these are provocative and challenging propositions. For Gray, through the many talks with his grandmother, they are, more than anything, confirmation of his learning and evolving vision of his own role in life.

Robinson is an exquisite writer and stylist who brings the different narrative strands and themes harmoniously together and into one fascinating and enriching reading experience. I want to add on a personal level, that I found Robinson’s choices for Makeda’s “dream places and times” highly relevant for the themes of the novel. For me, they have been meaningful also as they reminded me of my own journeys of discovery into Africa and, especially of my very own very similar experience in Mali’s Dogon region.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 5 readers
PUBLISHER:	OpenLens; 1 edition (August 30, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Friederike Knabe
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Randall Robinson
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Temple of My Familiar by Alice Walker

Bibliography:

• Makeda (August 2011)

Nonfiction:

• Defending the Spirit: A Black Life in America (1998)
• The Debt: What America Owes the Blacks (2000)
• The Reckoning: What Blacks Owe to Each Other (DATE)
• Quitting America: The Departure of a Black Man from His Native Land (2004)
• An Unbroken Agony: Haiti, from Revolution to the Kidnapping of a President (2007)

“I didn’t believe in demons; I ranked them with ghosts and vampires and werewolves, as products of a fevered imagination, or phenomena with a perfectly rational explanation. I did not realize yet, that summer when I was seventeen and my sister Polly was still alive, when the sun was shining and even the wind was warm and my whole body was restless, that there are worse things than being stuck in a small town for a year.  There are demons, and they are more terrible than we can imagine.”

Book Review:

Review by Lynn Harnett  (AUG 27, 2011)

The narrator’s father, Dr. Oliver Fox, a professor seeking fame and fortune, provides the catalyst for the eerie and violent events of Linden’s second (after The Vanishing of Katharina Linden) novel, a finely crafted literary tale of psychological terror.

But it’s the narrator herself, his 17-year-old daughter Lin, who finds herself at the center of it all, trying to control events that threaten to tear her family apart, events that are far beyond her understanding, much less her ability to manipulate. Indeed, her attempts to take matters into her own impatient hands make things worse.

From the first page, we know people will die, including Lin’s sister Polly.

“If anyone were to ask me, ‘What is the root of all evil?’ I would say not ‘Money,’ but ‘Food.’ It was food – specifically the lack of it – that killed my sister, or at least assisted at the death. And the old man that day in the orchard in Niederburgheim was the only person I have ever seen who died of eating an apple.”

Grant opens the novel with the Fox family – Oliver, his wife Tuesday, Lin, Polly and baby brother Reuben – nearly at the end of their road trip from their home in England to a small rural town in Germany.

A local historian has invited Oliver to come and research the famous, exquisite Allerheiligen stained glass, medieval masterpieces which have been lost to the world for more than 200 years and may well have been destroyed. They are also, legend has it, haunted, by the demon Bonchariant.

Lost, they pull to the side of the road to ask directions, but the man who appears to be sleeping in an apple orchard is actually dead (probably having fallen off his ladder), an apple with one bite taken beside him, the ground oddly littered with glass sparkling in the sunlight.

Oliver, unwilling to get involved, drives on, leaving the body for someone else to discover. Eventually they find the crumbling castle they have rented so Oliver can conduct his research from a suitably atmospheric base. These priceless windows will make Oliver’s reputation if he can only find them, but to begin with he is unable even to find the local man who invited him to come.

Eventually he tracks down the man’s address but Herr Heinrich Mahlberg no longer lives there. He has recently died, having suffered an accident in his bath. The other locals are not nearly as welcoming as Herr Mahlberg promised to be. One local historian offers to share his notes – handwritten in German – but assures Oliver he is wasting his time as the windows were destroyed by the French in the 19th century, the letter describing the destruction itself destroyed in the last war’s bombings.

Meanwhile Lin (who speaks fluent German) has started school and been thrown together with the boy next door – or, in this case, the boy on an uninviting farm the other side of the spooky woods. Michel drives her to school each morning, his crush painfully obvious, and unrequited.

Threats against the family mount as their isolation increases. Inexplicable events – all involving broken bits of glass – begin to loom larger as the family feels itself hounded by superstition or, as Lin begins to think, by the Bonchariant demon who inhabits the famous glass.

Mostly unable to speak the language and shunned by the locals, the atmosphere thickens around the isolated Fox family, while Lin finds herself becoming more deeply swept up in the ancient myths surrounding the glass.

Grant uses a winning combination of psychological tension and local folkloric atmosphere to advance her tale, building suspense and dread as she goes, much as she did in her first novel.

There is one problem however, which may not bother the YA audience the story is at least partly aimed at. Lin is a sulky teenager and for me at least, this grows tiresome. She’s always complaining about mess and other peoples’ self-centeredness but never lifts a finger to help with all the chores that don’t get done, or get left to her anorexic sister, Polly.

However, Grant delivers a smashing conclusion and by the end of the book most readers will have forgiven Lin her teen brattiness.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 4 readers
PUBLISHER:	Bantam; Original edition (June 14, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Lynn Harnett
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Helen Grant
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Vanishing of Katharina Linden

Bibliography:

• The Vanishing of Katharina Linden (2009; 2010 in US)
• The Glass Demon (2010; June 2011 in US)
• Wish Me Dead (2011 in UK)

“Mittomonai translates roughly as indecent or shameful. I looked it up when I got back to the barracks. But I don’t think I understand what Fumiko meant, not right away at least, not until some time had passed. At first and for a long while afterward, I thought she meant the idea of such a celebration at the scene of such a tragedy, but now I think her meaning was more complicated than that.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  AUG 9, 2011)

Only those who fully venerate war can think of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima as a glorified event. Indeed, many fictional books that are set in post-Hiroshima reconstruction are filled with vivid, colorful and poignant descriptions.

So it comes as a surprise that Michael Knight’s The Typist is such a gentle book. It is devoid of precisely what one might expect in a book set in the wake of World War II: no brow-beating, no heart-wrenching, no intrusive authorial political statements.

At its heart, The Typist is a coming-of-age book. The protagonist, Pfc. Francis Vancleave (Van) has one claim to fame: he types an astounding 95 words a minute. That skill keeps him off the battlefield, where his days are filled with mind-numbing letters of dictation and paperwork. That is, until he comes to the attention of General MacArthur, nicknamed “Bunny.” Bunny conscripts him to keep company with his young son, Arthur, an isolated boy, who enjoys staging figurine battles with his large assortment of toys.

Van is a man who is marginalized by life. As a married man – and we initially know little about his marriage – he does not enter into the “sport” of bedding the panpan girls who “smoked and teased and sent young boys over with indecent propositions.” Unlike his roommate, Clifford, he is a straight arrow, freshly minted from Alabama, more of an observer than a participant. He is able to lose himself in the games of his young charge (would Hannibel outfox Napolean?) and fits in beautifully in Arthur’s isolated world.

There is an authentic simplicity in Michael Knight’s sparse writing, a puissance that might elude a less gifted writer. As Van searches for his own legitimacy, Mr. Knight provides him with the luxury of reaching it at his own pace. This is slow, effortless, luxuriant prose, prose that casts a spell, prose that doesn’t waste a word and refuses to erect artificial roadblocks to the story. As far as comparisons, one work that comes instantly to mind is Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer. There is as much power in what is not stated as what is.

A subtle theme of football runs through the book – and also in the magnificent story that precedes The Typist, called The Atom Bowl. MacArthur, in shocking disregard of sensibilities, holds a football game to rally spirit in what he dubs the Atom Bowl; “the players trotted out and suddenly the ball was in the air, the Giants kicking to the Bears in the city of Hiroshima, on the island of Honshu, in the occupied nation of Japan.” If there is any doubt of how Michael Knight expects us to read this scene, it is dispelled by the opening story. In it, a young boy interviews his “pawpaw” – the last surviving participant of the Atom Bowl. As his pawpaw relives these “gory days,” the boy asks him, “What about you? Did you ever feel guilty or anything?” The response: “For what?”

This small, quiet novel centering on a rootless man in search for something he only dimly understands packs a disproportionate wallop. By juxtaposing complex characters with an economy of language, Michael Knight has created a compelling meditation of a sliver of history.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 14 readers
PUBLISHER:	Grove Press (August 9, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Michael Knight
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Boat by Nam Le

Bibliography:

• The Divining Rod (1998; 2010)
• Goodnight, Nobody: Stories (2003)
• Dogfight: And Other Stories (2007)
• The Holiday Season (2007)
• The Typist (August 2010)

“The life around us had the thin, flimsy quality of a stage set, the walls and furniture and props made of the cheapest, lightest materials. We lived a life whose only certainty was that it would change—just when we’d settled in, just when we’d gotten comfortable, the lights would go down and the scene would be cleared away.”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte  (JUL 19, 2011)

The premise—we are shaped by our interactions with others—sounds like something from a school summer writing assignment and is almost too bland to be worked with. But if truly great writing creates marvels from almost nothing, then Christie Hodgen’s Elegies for the Brokenhearted is one such wonder.

At the outset, it should be made clear that despite its title, this novel is far from depressing. The narrator, Mary Murphy, remembers her coming of age in small-town America in a family full of misfits. Through elegies narrated in the second person to five different people, Mary tells us the story of her life.

“We were a family of bad citizens,” Mary says when remembering her single, womanizing uncle Michael, “Drunk drivers and tax evaders, people who parked in handicapped spaces and failed to return shopping carts to their collection stands.” Despite his many failings, that Michael was one of the few stabilizing forces in Mary’s girlhood, is proof of the neglect she suffered at the hands of her mother. Mother was too busy living in denial that she had two girls (Mary and her sister, Malinda) and spent time watching movies that produced “unreasonable expectations about men, romance, and the tendency for wealth and good fortune to bestow themselves by happenstance on the world’s most beautiful people.” When Mom slowly realizes that good fortune does not automatically bestow itself on Liz Taylor look-alikes, she comes undone and takes the girls through a series of her failed marriages. By the time the last one to a Southern minister rolls around, the girls have long since given up on their mother as a source of emotional comfort.

It is through one of Mom’s many marriages that Mary’s path crosses Walter’s. Walter is a decent and suave black man who encourages Mary to look beyond the confines of the crumbling town in which she grows up. Eventually Mary moves on to college and meets a roommate who also has a profound influence on her.

Despite all the trials she goes through, Mary emerges with some level of stability at the end—a few steps short of triumphant. One hesitates to use the word “redemption” because it is overused so much these days, but this is one story of redemption that is done just beautifully. The daughter of a poet, Christine Hodgen’s prose is also spare and lyrical. There are many instances when the writing just blows you away. Here is one such: “Love—whatever else it might or might not be—was fleeting. Love stormed into your life and occupied it, it took over every corner of your soul, made itself comfortable, made itself wanted, then treasured, then necessary, love did all of this and then it did next the only thing it had left to do, it retreated, it vanished, it left no trace of itself. Love was horrifying.”

Hodgen’s metaphors—“The woman had white meringue-like hair that stood up in peaks”—are equally tremendous. Even if the prose is economical, Hodgen can really set up a sense of place. The chapter set in Maine is a case in point.

One of the many creative aspects of the novel is the way in which it is laid out—not linearly but like a puzzle that slowly clicks into place. Even better, there’s not an ounce of the saccharine rah-rah “you go girl” bravado that could easily have percolated into these pages. Hodgen focuses on bruised lives without a trace of melodrama and in doing so she has created a gem of a novel.

As kids, Mary and Malinda loved watching Tom and Jerry cartoons on television. “In that world, which we loved, characters suffered one fatal blow after another and yet sprang up, every time, unharmed,” Mary recalls. Real life unfortunately is never that simple but Hodgen has mined its complexities to wonderful effect. Elegies for the Brokenhearted makes for absolutely compelling storytelling.

When the final piece in the book fits in just so, we come away with a wonderful portrait of a young woman who is shaped by life’s vicissitudes just like the rest of us. What’s different about Mary Murphy is that she is the person she is, not because of the people around her but in spite of them.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 7 readers
PUBLISHER:	W. W. Norton & Company (July 18, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Christie Hodgen
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Everything by Kevin Canty Sing Them Home by Stephanie Kallos

Bibliography:

• A Jeweler’s Eye for Flaws: Stories (2002)
• Hello, I Must Be Going (2006)
• Elegies for the Broken Hearted (July 2010)

“ZIRA: What will he find out there, doctor?
DR. ZAIUS: His destiny.”

Book Review:

Review by Doug Bruns  (JUN 26, 2011)

Consider the big questions. For instance, what does language afford us? Is self-consciousness and all it implies (self-reflection, guilt, joy…) embedded in language, daresay a function of language? Why do we create art? Nature or nurture, what shapes us? How is love possible? Where does rage come from? Cruelty? What are we to make of the animals, those we imprison, those we consume, the beasts we love as companions? What, indeed, does it mean to be a human being and can it, whatever it might mean, be fully realized? Now, take these questions and a bunch more just like them, and wrap them up in a narrative so unique and compelling, so rich as to bring transparency to the questions. Then shape the story around a unique voice that ranges from the mindlessly inarticulate to the Mensian complex. If you can imagine experiencing all that, you have a sense of what this book affords the adventurous reader.

This is the story of Bruno Littlemore, chimpanzee extraordinaire. Rather, more properly, as the first-person narrator tells us, this book “contains the memoirs of Bruno Littlemore, as dictated to Gwendolyn Gupta between September 9, 2007 and August 8, 2008, at the Zastrow National Primate Research Center, Eastman, GA 31024.” And what a memoir it is.

Bruno, we are informed, grew up in the Primate House of the Lincoln Park Zoo, Chicago. He was the scion of Fanny, who was raised in the zoo, and Rotpeter, a chimp who had been rescued from the Congo jungle after watching “his mother and father murdered and subsequently devoured.” As a small chimp, Bruno was delivered to a the University of Chicago’s behavioral primatologist, Dr. Lydia Littlemore. He recalls the meeting early in the book. “I will begin with my first significant memory, which is the first time I met Lydia. I was still a child at the time. I was about six years old. She and I immediately developed a rapport. She picked me up and held me, kissed my head, played with my rubbery little hands, and I wrapped my arms around her neck, gripped her fingers, put strands of her hair in my mouth, and she laughed. Maybe I had already fallen in love with her, and the only way I knew to express it was by sucking on her hair.”

He quickly grasps the complexity of evolved consciousness. “I am Bruno,” he declares. “I am an animal with a human tongue, a human brain, and human desires, the most human among them to be more than what I am.” And yes, as he states, he falls in love with his keeper. Does that imply what we think it does? Well, jumping ahead, yes, they have sex, assuming your mind raced there. Bruno takes evolutionary steps, learns language, creates art, walks erect and of course has sex. This is a coming-of-age memoir, ergo sex is discovered. Inter-species relations might put some readers off, understandably. However, in the context of understanding the measure of humanness it cannot be avoided. Hale manages this territory with aplomb. But, not to get derailed, there is love here too. Lydia removes Bruno from the captors and takes him home to further her research. He has demonstrated a capacity for intelligence beyond the norm and she is convinced he is the subject from which careers are launched. That is, before she is as smitten by him as he is by her. “Of course I was in love for all the vainest and greediest reasons,” writes Bruno, several years later. “I climbed down from that tree to spend the rest of my life running from the yawning darkness of animal terror toward the light of fire stolen from the gods, and like you, I remain in a state of constant pursuit, never quite escaping the darkness nor ever reaching the light.” This is no ordinary chimp obviously.

Bruno finds creative relief in art. He paints. He exhibits. He becomes known. But as enlightened as Bruno is, he cannot repress his more beastly urges. His outbreaks eventually cost Lydia her job. Their relationship breaks into the news and they are scandalized. They escape to the compound of a wealthy animal-rights couple in Colorado. Eventually they return to Chicago where Lydia falls ill. Bruno, left to his own devices, plunges solo into the world of humanity. He travels to New York, is befriended by Leon, a Falstafian character of brilliant, yet dubious talents. Together they produce Shakespeare’s Tempest. But circumstances intrude and Bruno must escape, returning to Chicago. Picaresque as his journeys might be, the weight of his adventures at times seems unwieldy, as if they might all fall in upon themselves, so dense and allusion-filled they seem.

Returned to Chicago, Bruno’s last act of unbridled rage occurs when he discovers that his primate sibling, Céleste, is being subjected to animal experimentation. He commits murder and lands in jail. Ironically, it is his voice, his command of language and story telling which, like Scheherazade, saves him. He is an animal, after all, and should be “put down.” But he saves himself–and his story. Nine years after committing the crime, 24 years old and hairless, his face surgically altered (he wanted a human nose), he dictates his memoir.

This book is compelling every way you consider it. It is rich in philosophy, ideas, notions, questions and preponderances. Yet, as practiced in the best of the literary tradition (yes, this book, from Dostoevsky to Nabokov, stands tall), the ideas are carried along on a narrative stream which twisting and turning is wildly entertaining. The writing is gin-clear and elegant. (You’ll want to have a dictionary handy.) This is a first novel. What a debut for Mr. Hale, a truly wonderful and heretofore unknown author.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 50 readers
PUBLISHER:	Twelve; First Edition edition (February 2, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Doug Bruns
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Benjamin Hale
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of:The Descent of Manby Kevin DesingerLove in Infant Monkeys by Lydia Millet

Bibliography:

• The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore (February 2011)

“There was no induction ceremony, no melding of spit and blood. Those who tattooed themselves did it with no pressure from Jude or anyone else. The only thing they had to give was their word – no drinking, no drugs. Extra credit for no fucking or flesh eating.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (JUN 08, 2011)

It’s 1987 and New York’s lower east side and alphabet city are places for the homeless, vagrants, the impoverished, hippies, some immigrants who have held out through the next generation and some younger folks who call themselves “straight edge.” Straight edge refers to teenagers who like hard rock and punk but live a straight and clean lifestyle – no meat, no sex, no booze and no drugs. Many shave their heads and are into tattoos. That’s what Ten Thousand Saints by Eleanor Henderson is about – a group of straight edge teens and their parents trying to understand themselves and one another as they venture through life, a lot of it in alphabet city in Manhattan.

The book opens up in Vermont in a city that sounds a lot like Burlington. Two teenagers who live there, Jude and Teddy, are way into drugs. They smoke weed, huff, drink , do mushrooms and basically try to stay high as often and for as long as they can. They also hate school and cut out as often as they can get away with it.

Jude has been adopted by parents who are now divorced, both semi-hippies. His mother blows glass for making bongs and his father, who lives in New York, sells weed for a living. Since his parents’ divorce, Jude’s father, Les, has been living in Manhattan and has been seeing a self-absorbed ballerina named Di. Di has a daughter named Eliza who plans to visit Vermont and wants to meet Jude. Eliza is a rich girl who has been kicked out of several boarding schools for drugs and truancy.

Teddy’s mother is an alcoholic who splits town on New Year’s Eve, the day of Teddy’s sixteenth birthday and the day that this book opens. Teddy has no idea who his father is. He has an older brother named Johnny who lives in New York and is into the straight edge lifestyle.

Jude and Teddy feel like outcasts in Vermont. They hang out with each other but basically don’t have other friends. They like to hang out at a record store and play music together. They’re teased a lot and just don’t fit in.

Eliza arrives in Vermont and parties with Teddy, sharing cocaine with him after he’s already huffed freon, and gasoline, smoked weed and drank. They also have sex. The next morning, Eliza is on her way back to Manhattan and Teddy is dead by OD. Jude is in the hospital with hypothermia and getting detoxed from all the substances he’s used. It was a close call for Jude but he makes it. When Jude gets out of the hospital, he decides to go live with his father in New York.

In New York, Eliza, Jude and Johnny become like a family of three. This is intensified when Eliza finds out that she is pregnant with Teddy’s baby from their one night together. Because Teddy is dead, Johnny really wants Eliza to have this baby to honor Teddy’s memory. Eliza is into this idea as well. She is also into Johnny who does not appear to be into girls.

Eliza and Jude embrace the straight edge lifestyle which is portrayed as a hair’s width from a cult. It embraces Hare Krishna and many Hindu concepts. Johnny is called Mr. Clean because of his devotion to Straight Edge and his fanatic adherence to its principles. It becomes ironic then when he says he is the father of Eliza’s child. In their minds, the parents are more likely to let them keep the baby if the father is alive.

Eliza runs away with Johnny so that she can have the baby. Her mother wants her to have an abortion but she won’t hear of this. The parents are portrayed as distant, absent or stoned. There is not one parent who is really present and attuned to their child’s life. Ironically, at one point in Jude’s childhood, his doctor thinks he may have fetal alcohol syndrome because of his dyslexia, facial structure and hyperactivity with ADD. Despite this possible diagnosis, Jude emerges as a real hero in the novel, a good guy with empathy and strong emotions. He may not have the best judgment but he turns himself into a leader who is respected.

They form a music band and Jude becomes a natural born leader of the group. They travel back to Vermont several times during the novel and recruit others for the band and for the straight edge lifestyle. The band travels up and down the coast and is even interviewed by different zines for their lyrics and overall music.

It is interesting to imagine the Tompkins Square Park of their day – filled with homeless, empty crack vials, condoms, and violence. Now, the same park is filled with nannies and babies and surrounded by million dollar condos. The book is careful to stay true to the New York of the late 1980’s and the gen X’ers who are looking for a place to fit in and make their mark. Ms. Henderson is not judgmental about straight edge but this reader felt that it became another sort of addiction for many of its followers.

The book was fascinating. At times it was repetitive and went off on some rabbit trails. It could have been about fifty pages shorter and been stronger for that editing. However, even with the length it stands at now – 383 pages – it is a fascinating book. I’ve never read a book that caught the gen X’ers so vividly and so perspicaciously. This accomplished novel does not read like a debut novel, which it is. Ms. Henderson is a writer with a rare talent.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 10 readers
PUBLISHER:	Ecco (June 7, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Eleanor Henderson and her website
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Bewildered by Peter Rock

Bibliography:

• Ten Thousand Saints (June 2011)

“If I could have ceased what pendulums swung, or wheels turned, or water clocks emptied, then, in order to keep the Fates from marching in time, I would have, for though it is what a boy naturally wishes when he fears change will come upon what he loves and take it away, a man remembers it, too, and in his heart wishes the same when all around him he feels only loss, loss that has been his companion for some time, and promises to remain at his side.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (MAY 25, 2011)

World War I was the deadliest conflict in Western history, but contemporary portrayals of war in literature and cinema primarily focus on examples of combat from the past fifty or sixty years. At a time when the Great War is receding into the annals of distant history, this elegiac and edifying novel has been released–a small, slim but powerful story of a young soldier, Josef Vinich, who hails from a disenfranchised and impoverished family in rural Austria-Hungary.

Josef was born in the rural mining town of Pueblo, Colorado, in 1899, to immigrant parents from Austria-Hungary who dreamed of a better life in the United States. The opening eleven-page prologue, a stunning and deeply felt family tragedy, is subsequently followed by a move back to the Empire, to his father’s village of Pastvina (which is now part of the Czech Republic). Josef’s father then marries a cruel woman with two young sons. They live the hardscrabble existence of shepherds, barely able to put food on the table, in the cold and brutal climate of the region. Josef and his father live for part of the year in a cabin in the Carpathian Mountains and ply their trade of husbandry in order to survive.

At the age of ten, Josef is introduced to his father’s Krag rifle, and is instructed in the art of hiding and hunting their prey. A distant cousin, Marian Pes–nicknamed Zlee–who was one year older than Josef, is sent to live with them. Zlee has an instinct for shepherding, and together they form a brotherly bond of love and respect. Josef’s sleep is haunted by dreams of loss and he gradually becomes distant from his father.

In 1916, when Zlee turns eighteen, both boys go to the conscription office to join up. Josef alters the age on his identity card so that he can go, too. During artillery training, they are recognized for their skill of aiming and shooting, and are sent to train as snipers, or “sharpshooters,” which in German is called Scharfschützen. What follows is a coming of age story set in the harsh climate and geography in the trenches of war–to Austria to train as Scharfschützen, and eventually to the sub-zero temperature of the Italian Alps.

Krivak writes with the precision and beauty of a finely cut gem and with the meticulous pace and purpose of a classical conductor. Every word is necessary and neatly positioned. His prose is evocative, poetic, and distilled. There is a place between the breath of the living and the faces of the dead, and that is where Josef’s soul resides. When the author takes the reader to the abyss of loss and the ghosts of Time, it is riveting. However, the emotional resonance was primarily potent in the prologue and only periodically in the body of the story, and was otherwise low-timbred and somewhat distancing. The narrative is so deliberately controlled that at times it felt antiseptic and dispassionate.

Krivak’s first novel is highly recommended as an addition to a library of World War I literature. This is an admirable debut, and it is evident from the prologue that Krivak is capable of crafting an emotionally satisfying story.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 13 readers
PUBLISHER:	Bellevue Literary Press (April 19, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Publisher page on Andrew Krivak
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Work Song by Ivan Doig A Soldier of the Great War by Mark Helprin

Bibliography:

• The Sojourn (April 2011)

Nonfiction:

• A Long Retreat: In Search of a Religious Life (2008)