“And she had ignored, too, the cement in her soul. Her blog was doing well, with thousands of unique visitors each month, and she was earning good speaking fees, and she had a fellowship at Princeton and a relationship with Blaine—“ You are the absolute love of my life,” he’d written in her last birthday card— and yet there was cement in her soul. It had been there for a while, an early morning disease of fatigue, a bleakness and borderlessness. It brought with it amorphous longings, shapeless desires, brief imaginary glints of other lives she could be living, that over the months melded into a piercing homesickness.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (MAR 15, 2014)

Americanah is a wonderful epic saga of love, hair, blogs, racism in America, and life in Nigeria. It takes place over a period of about 15 years and is primarily about a Nigerian woman named Ifemelu and her first love, Obinze. The meaning of the word Americanah is a person who returns to Nigeria after spending time abroad.

The main part of the story takes place in a hair salon in Trenton, New Jersey. Ifemelu is on a fellowship at Princeton and the nearest place to get weaves is in Trenton. As she is getting her hair done she goes back in time and the reader gets filled in with her life story.

Ifemelu grew up in poverty in Lagos. She managed to go to university there and won a scholarship to Wellson, a college in Philadelphia. She struggles with money and finds it very difficult to get a job. When she does work, she sends money back home to her parents. Ifemulu’s primary job is as a nanny. She describes the dynamics of her employer’s marriage as “she loves him and he loves himself.” She is introduced to her employer’s cousin Curt and Ifemelu and he have a relationship for quite a while. His being white and rich cause some difficulties for them.

Ifemelu cuts off all contact with Obinze despite the fact that they had planned to be together. She had made a choice to do something that left her shamed and abased and she is unable to tell Obinze about it. So, rather than tell him, she severs their contact. He is distraught and does not know what to do. He continues to write to her for months but there is no answer from Ifemelu.

Meanwhile, Obinze goes to London where he lives underground after his six month visa expires. He is working construction and continues to do this until he is deported back to Nigeria.

Ifemelu remains in the United States for 13 years and has a series of relationships with different men. Of significance besides Curt, who is white, is Blaine who is African American and a professor at Yale. Theirs is a long-term relationship that Ifemelu breaks off in order to return to Lagos.

Ifemelu has started a blog called “Raceteenth: Understanding America for the non-American black.” She writes anonymously about varied topics of racism that she encounters in the United States and the differences between being African American and a non-American black person. Her blog is very successful and brings her status and money as people make financial contributions to keep the blog going. She also does speaking engagements about topics she covers in her blog.

The book has many characters in it, each of whom we come to know and connect with. However, it is primarily about Ifemelu and Obinze, their lives and love. I found the book fascinating and very readable. It does not ever let go of the messages that the author seeks to provide the reader. Racism is a constant theme in the book as is life in America for black Americans and non-American blacks. I found the theme of blogging as a way to share knowledge very intriguing. Actual blogs are a part of the book.

Adiche is a wonderful writer. Her short stories, all of which I’ve read, have knocked me out. I plan on reading her other novels. I can see why this brilliant woman has received a MacArthur Genius Award.   Highly recommended

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 511 readers
PUBLISHER:	Anchor; Reprint edition (March 4, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie The Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie website
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Thing Around Your Neck: Stories Purple Hibiscus

Bibliography:

• Purple Hibiscus (2003)
• Half a Yellow Sun (2006)
• The Thing Around Your Neck: Stories (2009)
• Americanah (May 2013) 

There are ten of them in the limo’s plush passenger bay, the eight remaining soldiers of Bravo squad, their PA escort Major Mac, and the movie producer Albert Ratner, who at the moment is hunkered down in BlackBerry position. Counting poor dead Shroom and the grievously wounded Lake there are two Silver Stars and eight Bronze among them, all ten of which defy coherent explanation. “What were you thinking during the battle?” the pretty TV reporter in Tulsa asked, and Billy tried. God knows he tried, he never stops trying, but it keeps slipping and sliding, corkscrewing away, the thing of it, the it, the ineffable whatever.

“I’m not sure,” he answered. “Mainly it was just this sort of road rage feeling. Everything was blowing up and they were shooting our guys and I just went for it, I really wasn’t thinking at all.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman (FEB 27, 2014)

It is, perhaps, a fortuitous accident that I turned the last pages of Ben Fountain’s absolutely brilliant novel during Memorial Day…a day when rhetoric about courage, support, sacrifice, and patriotism overflows.

Billy Lynn – the eponymous hero of this book – is a genuine American hero. He and his fellow Bravo Squad members decimated an insurgency – caught on film by an embedded Fox News crew — and became overnight sensations in a nation starved for good news about Iraq. They are brought home for a media-intensive “Victory Tour” – in cities that happen to lie in an electoral swing state — to reinvigorate support for the war. We meet them at the end of that tour, on a rainy Thanksgiving, hosted by America’s Team, The Dallas Cowboys.

They are, in more ways than one, anonymous to an American public; their reinvented names are meant to erase their identity (Major Mac, Mango, Lodes, Billy, etc.) In the fabled Texas Stadium, their faces are interspersed on a JumboTron screen with ads for Chevy cars and Cowboy-brand toaster ovens and high-capacity ice-makers.

Surrounded by so-called patriots, Billy and his friends are bombarded with words stripped of meaning: “rerrRist, currj, freedom, nina leven, Bush, values, support.” Billy reflects: “They hate our freedoms? Yo, they hate our actual guts! Billy suspects his fellow Americans secretly know better, but something in the land is stuck on teenage drama, on extravagant theatrics of ravaged innocence and soothing mud wallows of self-justifying pity.”

The people that surround him are insatiably expecting Billy to impart wisdom in sound bites. Amid a world of plenty, multi-millionaires who have never put themselves in harm’s way let loose a stream of platitudes but Billy “truly envies these people, the luxury of terror as a talking point…” At another point, he reflects, “Never do Americans sound so much like a bunch of drunks as when they are celebrating at the end of their national anthem.”

Nineteen-year-old Billy – still a virgin, with major lust going on for a Cowboys cheerleader who believes that cheerleading is a “spiritual calling” – has the necessary replies to inane questions down pat. He is as real as he can be, as American as he can be.

And in this way, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk –marketed as a satire and blurbed as a new Catch-22 – is anything but. There is nothing surreal about it; in fact, it is an entirely apt portrayal of the times we live in. I thought this book was absolutely brilliant – well-crafted, filled with insight and wisdom, and heart-wrenching. In fact, I’d go so far as to call it the quintessential American novel, asking that all-important question: who are we and what do we want to become?

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 506 readers
PUBLISHER:	Ecco; First Edition edition (May 1, 2012)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Ben Fountain
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of:

Bibliography:

• Brief Encounters with Che Guevara: Stories (2007)
• Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (2012)

“And if you decide not to read anymore, hey, no problem, because you’re not the one I was waiting for anyway. But if you decide to read on, then guess what? You’re my kind of time being and together we’ll make magic!”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (JAN 27, 2014)

How do a century-old modern-thinking Buddhist nun, a WW II kamikaze pilot, a bullied 16-year-old Japanese schoolgirl on the verge of suicide, her suicidal father, a struggling memoirist on a remote island of British Columbia, Time, Being, Proust, language, philosophy, global warming, and the 2011 Japanese tsunami connect?

In this brilliantly plotted and absorbing, layered novel, one can find the theme in a quote from Proust, quoted by Ozeki:

“In reality, every reader, while he is reading, is the reader of his own self.”

Remember these poignant and piercing words, as it underpins all that this book is about. You can catch on immediately that it is self-referential, at least to some degree. The memoirist’s name is Ruth (like the author)–both Ruths have a husband name Oliver and live on a remote island in British Colombia. And both are writers. The Ruth of the novel suffers from writer’s block. She has been trying to write a book of her mother’s last years living with Alzheimer’s, and to illustrate her own feelings about her experience as daughter and caretaker.

One day, Ruth finds some barnacle-encrusted belongings washed up ashore, possibly from the 2011 Japan tsunami and the tidal drifts that deposited debris in their direction. Inside is a Hello Kitty lunchbox, a wristwatch circa WWII, letters in Japanese, a French composition book, and a diary of a 16-year-old Japanese girl named Nao (pronounced “Now”) written in English. The diary itself is set inside a hacked copy of Proust’s “À la recherche du temps perdu” (In Search of Lost Time). Proust’s novel is removed, leaving the shell as a cover protecting Nao’s secret journal.

In the meantime, a native Japanese crow has inhabited the island where Ruth and Oliver live with their moody cat, eerily haunting the island with its ke ke ke song.

According to the narrative, the ancient Zen master, Sh?b?genz?, stated, “Time itself is being…and all being is time…In essence, everything in the entire universe is intimately linked with each other as moments in time, continuous and separate.”

I was hooked by that time, and for the time…being.

I know that, thus far, I have only quoted great historical thinkers and writers, whose words are enfolded in this shimmering tapestry of a book. However, be assured that Ozeki’s contemporary narrative will both exhilarate and touch you.

“I am reaching through time to touch you,” writes Nao with her purple gel pen.

Ruth decides to hunker down with Nao’s diary, a few pages at a time, each night reading to Oliver and herself. She learns early on that Nao is planning on killing herself after she writes down the life story of her great-grandmother Jiko, the Buddhist nun. As the diary unfolds, it is evident that Nao is also recording the story of her own life. Moreover, she shares the events, as she knows it, of her dead great-uncle, the WW II pilot who was also a philosopher and lover of French literature.

The opening of the book is abstract, unformed, and philosophical, but that only lasts for a few pages. Once the chapters begin, the narrative alternates between Ruth and Nao. I admit to an early concern, that the novel may be a YA-adult crossover, due to the chipper tone of Nao and her indelibly teenage style. But, eventually, as the story penetrates and cross-cuts through characters, the storylines become a piercing symphony. I am confident that you will be moved by not just its warmth, but its luminous beauty.

“In the interstices between sleeping and waking, she floated in a dark liminal state that was not quite a dream, but was perpetually on the edge of becoming one. There she hung, submerged and tumbling slowly, like a particle of flotsam just below the crest of a wave that was always just about to break.”

Along the way, you will learn numerous Japanese words, which are footnoted, and Buddhist concepts, which are woven in seamlessly. I have had too many experiences of overweening narratives exerting Buddhist credo that discharge as shallow power point presentations or pedantic coffee table ideas. Ozeki doesn’t disappoint. With a little magic realism (just a little!), a pinch of Murakami, and a lot of heart, she pulls the threads all together into a radiant tapestry. This book is a gift of love.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 279 readers
PUBLISHER:	Penguin Books (December 31, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Ruth Ozeki
EXTRAS:	Guardian Interview
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman by Haruki Murakami

Bibliography:

• My Year of Meats (1998)
• All Over Creation (2003)
• A Tale for the Time Being (March 2013)

“The story of Oda Sotatsu begins with a confession that he signed.

He had fallen in with a man named Kakuzo and a girl named Jito Joo. These were somewhat wild characters, particularly Sato Kakuzo. He was in trouble, or had been. People knew it.

Now this is what happened: somehow Kakuzo met Oda Sotatsu, and somehow he convinced him to sign a confession for a crime that he had not committed.

That he should sign a confession for a crime that he did not commit is strange. It is hard to believe. Yet, he did in fact sign it. When I learned of these events, and when I researched them, I found that there was a reason he did so, and that reason is—he was compelled to by a wager.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (JAN 22, 2014)

I have never quite read anything like Silence Once Begun. It’s disturbing, lyrical, original, provocative, and experimental in the best of ways. Yet it stands on the shoulders of giants that came before it: Sartre comes to mind, as does Camus.

The premise is instantly (pardon the pun) arresting. A thread salesman named Oda Sotatsu signs a confession for a crime that has baffled the Japanese authorities – eight older individuals disappear without a trace in what becomes known as the Narito Disappearances. Yet once jailed, he utters barely a word….even though we, the readers, know he is not guilty from the first pages.

A man who refers to himself as the Interviewer – named Jesse Ball – meets with Sotatsu’s parents, brother and sister, jailers, and a woman perceived as a love interest. Written in the conceit of notes drawn from interviews via tape-device, the story takes on an immediacy and fascination – particularly as we realize that the character Jesse Ball is in search of existential answers in his own life.

“One can’t say how one behaved or why, really. Such situations, they are far more complex than any either/or proposition. It is simplistic to produce events in pairs and lean them against each other like cards.”

And so it is here. Each person whom Jesse Ball encounters provides a credible part of the puzzle, yet each urges him not to trust anyone else. From one character: “You have to be very careful whom you trust. Everyone has a version, and most of them are wrong.” Who is telling the truth and who is lying – and in the grand scheme of things, does it even matter? As Sotatsu’s brother says about their father: “He said I had a liar’s respect for the truth, which is too much respect.”

The author Jesse Ball (through the character of Jesse Ball) raises the most elemental and universal issues. Among them: it is impossible to see things while we’re still searching; we can only find things by seeing what is there. Reason alone is not the answer; we go to absurd lengths to prove ourselves reasonable.

Interwoven with fables and poetic language (it is no surprise that Jesse Ball has published several works of verse), this story is also grounded strongly in reality. For literary readers, this book is sheer genius and has put Jesse Ball firmly on my radar for his past and future books.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 11 readers
PUBLISHER:	Pantheon (January 28, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Jesse Ball
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Way Through Doors

Bibliography:

• Samedi The Deafness (2007)
• The Way Through Doors (2009)
• The Curfew (2011)
• Silence One Begun (January 2014)

“I’m sure they’d send me straight to an orphanage as soon as they’d exhausted me with questions to work out how disturbed I am, because they’d never believe me. They’d never believe someone would stay with his dead mother in the apartment because he doesn’t want to go to an orphanage. It’s too simple an explanation, so of course they’d have to look for other ones.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (JAN 21, 2014)

This novel is told in the first person, from the point of view of Luca, a young primary school student living in Italy. His mother is 37 years old and has been profoundly depressed for years, talking little, moving slowly and feeling like her life has ebbed slowly out of her. Often she cries and Luca does not know how to console her. “When Mama has nightmares, she says it’s not possible even to sleep in peace in this world, and that’s what I think too. Other times she says the pills have stolen her dreams, that sleep is just an inky-black nothingness, and she wakes up confused and doesn’t know which way is up. Sometimes she makes coffee without putting in the water or else the coffee.”

Luca has always considered himself a “half-orphan.”  He has never met his father and has been raised solely by his mother, a single parent. “I would never, ever want to become a complete orphan because then things get messed up for real.” Luca’s mother frequently brings men home in an effort to provide a father for Luca. Things never seem to work out, however, so she ends up getting him a cat that he names “Blue.”  Blue is his constant companion and confidante, his friend and even his “personal assistant” after his mother’s death.

One morning, Luca goes into his mother’s bedroom to wake her up. She doesn’t stir and he is worried. He thinks she is dead but at first is not certain as he’s never seen a dead person before. He becomes pretty sure that she is dead over time and begins to panic. “What should I do? Should I wait a little longer, or ask for help right away? I can’t ask for help. If Mama is dead, I can’t tell anyone. If I tell, they’ll take me to the orphanage.” Being a “complete orphan” is Luca’s biggest fear. He doesn’t want to leave his apartment and go to an orphanage and so he leaves his dead mother in her bedroom and goes on with his life as usual including attending school, playing with friends, attending movies.

Luca is despairing. He cries unceasingly for his mother and is beside himself, feeling like he is in a void but also needing to be hyper-vigilent so as not to be caught. He can’t let others know that anything is wrong and so he must put on a facade that everything is okay. “Someone whose mother has just died can’t do homework, but that isn’t an excuse, because I can’t tell anyone about it. It has to stay secret, a really big secret just between us. I don’t want to end up in an orphanage.”

“I have to do my homework. I can’t risk them suspecting anything.”

Luca goes through all kinds of machinations so as not to draw attention to himself at school or with his friends. At one point, after his mother’s death, he even invites a friend over to his house. His friend notices the odor that emanates from the bedroom and Luca makes up all kinds of excuses. Luca realizes shortly that the odor of rotting flesh is overwhelming. He opens all the windows and lives in a freezing cold environment, regressing into a fantasy life and memories.

Luca is a creative and precocious child, a lover of words. He is like a mini-adult in many ways, wise about the world as one would not expect a child to be. However, a child can’t be wise about his mother’s death. It is an emotional experience that burns through and through and this is what the author has so poignantly rendered in The First True Lie. No matter how hard Luca tries to act “normal” after his mother’s death, he is reeling from the experience and must integrate it into his life. Unless this trauma can be integrated, it will overwhelm him.

Though this book is quite short at 143 pages, it takes on a horrific and tragic subject that honors and respects Luca’s character. He comes across as wise and childlike at the same time, a gifted child facing a world of paradox, terror, and hope.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 4 readers
PUBLISHER:	Hogarth (January 21, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Marina Mander
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More from a child’s perspective: Room by Emma Donoghue The Boy in the Striped Pajamas by John Boyne

Bibliography:

• A Fantastical Manual of Hypochondria (2000)
• A Catalogue of Goodbyes (2010)
• The First True Lie (2011; January 2014 in US)
• Nessundorma (2013)

“Perhaps we long for something like the situation these other creatures have— the ants, the bees— where the thinking is outsourced.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  (JAN 9, 2014)

This was a wonderfully easy book to get into and enjoy; now I just need to figure out what it was about! Although there are no quotation marks, it seems to be a dialogue: a man whom we later identify as Andrew talking to what appears to be some kind of psychologist, someone who studies the mind. Andrew himself is a cognitive neuroscientist; he studies the physical brain. On one level, Doctorow seems to be examining the distinction between the two, as though Andrew’s mind were behaving in ways that Andrew’s brain alone cannot explain.

There are strange discrepancies in the narrative at first. Andrew refers to himself mainly in the first person, but occasionally in the third; is this perhaps his brain talking, rather than the man himself? He hears voices. He relates the same event in different time-frames and different ways, yet he insists he is not dreaming. At times, the narrative tricks reminded me of Paul Auster, though the more bizarre elements here do little more than ruffle the surface of an apparently straightforward story.

Andrew seems to leave a wake of disaster behind him. At the beginning, he tells of being at his wits’ end, giving his divorced first wife the baby he had with his late second wife because he cannot look after her alone. We will soon hear about the tragedy that led to the divorce. The tragedy of the second wife’s death will take over half the book to emerge, but we will get there through a glowing love story that is the greatest source of joy in Doctorow’s intriguing novel, and the place where Andrew comes most completely to life as an individual.

I won’t say much more about the plot. It is important, I think, that Doctorow does not at first tell us how long ago these events happened, who the psychologist is, or where Andrew is now. All these things will be revealed towards the end, as the book, now broken down into ever-shorter sections, impinges on real events in recent American history — but impinges upon them in increasingly unreal ways. There is an element of near-fantasy at the end, which makes me wonder whether Andrew is intended as a real person after all?

There is some evidence for this. One topic that interests Andrew is the question of “group brain” — the communal consciousness that gives meaning to a colony of ants, or enables a flock of birds to fly and wheel as one. He wonders if this applies to humans, too: if there is such a thing, for instance, as a “government brain,” or if a presidential election does not represent something more than a simple majority at the ballot box, but a kind of national wish-fulfillment? Doctorow has often used his novels to examine and critique specific periods in American history. At the end of this one, I was just beginning to think of Andrew less as the weirdly unreliable narrator of the first part, less even as the fortunate lover of the middle section, but perhaps simply as a symbol for the changes in the national psyche over the decade or so during which the main action takes place?

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 18 readers
PUBLISHER:	Random House (January 14, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	E.L. Doctorow
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: All The Time in the World  Homer and Langley The March

Bibliography:

• Welcome to Hard Times (1960)
• Big As Life (1966)
• The Book of Daniel (1971)
• Ragtime (1974)
• Loon Lake (1980)
• World’s Fair (1985)
• Billy Bathgate (1989) / 
• The Waterworks (1994)
• City of God (2000)
• Sweet and Stories (2004)
• The March (2005)
• Homer & Langley (2009)
• All the Time in the World: New and Selected Stories (2011)
• Andrew’s Brain (January 2014)

Movies from books:

• Ragtime (1981)
• Billy Bathgate (1991)

“Don’t you wonder sometimes,” Ursula said. “If just one small thing had been changed, in the past, I mean. If Hitler had died at birth, or if someone had kidnapped him as a baby and brought him up in— I don’t know, say, a Quaker household— surely things would be different.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shultman (JAN 8, 2014)

Kate Atkinson’s first novel, Scenes at the Museum, began with two words: “I exist!” This one says, “I exist! I exist again! And again!” Life After Life is a marvel. It’s one of the most inventive novels I’ve ever read, rich with details, beautifully crafted, and filled with metaphysical questions about the nature of time, reality, and the ability of one person to make a dramatic difference based on one small twist of fate. In short, it’s amazing.

On a cold and snowy night in 1910, Ursula Todd arrives early, a cord wrapped around her neck, already dead. Scratch that. On a cold and snowy night in 1910, Ursula Todd arrives early, lets out a lusty wail, and makes a safe transition into this world. Ursula Todd will die many times in this mesmerizing and compelling novel and in many different ways. But each time, she will gain some innate foresight to help her avoid the traps that have occurred before.

It’s not as if writing about living again and making other choices hasn’t been done before by contemporary writers. Lionel Shriver writes about parallel lives in Post-Birthday World; Stephen King delves right into it in 11-23-63 and so on. What makes this novel extraordinary is that this novel is a layered and nuance exploration on the very nature of time and reality. As Ursula’s doctor says to her,

“Time is a construct, in reality everything flows, no past or present, only the now.”

In Ms. Atkinson’s world, one character – Ursula – can be the embodiment of many different people, often as a result of one small alteration. Look – here is Ursula, a fiercely protective mother. But look again – now she is a mistress, an alcoholic, even a killer. Each Ursula rings authentic. And each life could just as easily have happened.

This is a unique and highly exciting way of storytelling, spanning the monumental history of two world wars and complicated family dynamics. Ursula’s memory is like a “cascade of echoes” as Ms. Atkinson returns again and again to a core question: “What if there was no demonstrable reality? What if there was nothing beyond the mind?”

As the choices and consequences grow, the scenes often turn on small details. What book is Ursula reading – a French classic or a Pitman shorthand manual? What is her reaction to a lost dog that crosses her path? In other books, details like these could be easily glanced over; in Life After Life, they become crucial. Everything can turn on the drop of a dime – a simple push or an impromptu decision.

“She had been here before. She had never been here before…There was always something just out of sight, just around the corner, something she could never chase down – something that was chasing her down.”

At one point, Ursula briskly states, “No point in thinking. You just have to get on with life. We only have one after all, we should try and do our best. We can never get it right, but we must try.” But what if we DID have more than one? Ay, there’s the question…

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 1,444 readers
PUBLISHER:	Reagan Arthur Books (April 2, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shultman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Kate Atkinson
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: When Will There Be Good News? One Good Turn Case Histories

Bibliography:

• Behind the Scenes at the Museum (1995)
• Human Croquet (1997)
• Emotionally Weird (2000)
• Not the End of the World (2002)
• Life After Life (April 2013) 

Detective Jackson Brodie series:

• Case Histories (2004)
• One Good Turn (2006)
• When Will There Be Good News? (2008)
• Started Early, Took My Dog (2011)

“Telling Sandro these things collapsed the layers between me as woman and me as child. Sandro saw both, loved both. He understood they were not the same. It was not the case that one thing morphed into another, child into woman. You remained the person you were before things happened to you.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (JAN 1, 2014)

There isn’t much plot in this novel, but it is a hell of story/Bildungsroman of a young woman known as just Reno, an art studies graduate in 1977 who dared to race her Moto Valera motorcycle at high-speed velocities to create land art. Land art was a “traceless art” created from leaving an almost invisible line in the road from surging speeds at over 110 mph. “Racing was drawing in time.” Literally and figuratively.

This era generated a seminal movement in New York where artistic expression in the subversive sect was animate, inflamed, ephemeral, breathing — a mix of temporal and performance art and the avant-garde/punk scene. This was also an age of conceptual art, which grew out of minimalism and stressed the artist’s concept rather than the object itself. Time was the concept of Reno’s art, something to be acted upon.

“You have time. Meaning, don’t use it, but pass through time in patience, waiting for something to come. Prepare for its arrival. Don’t rush to meet it. Be a conduit…I felt this to be true. Some people might consider this passivity but I did not. I considered it living.”

The novel, narrated by Reno, is all about her observation and experiences as she comes of age in a revolutionary time. She lives in a shabby, run-down hole in the wall in New York–“blank and empty as my new life, with its layers upon layers of white paint like a plaster death mask over the two rooms, giving them an ancient urban feeling.”

As she gets caught up with the underground movement in the East Village, called Up Against the Wall, Motherfuckers, and later with the Red Brigades of Rome, Reno is herself a conduit for the people she meets and gets involved with, such as her older, rebellious boyfriend, Sandro Valera, son of the Fascist-friendly mogul of Valera motorbikes.

Reno came to New York by way of Nevada, eager to demonstrate her art through photography and motorbikes. She’s “shopping for experience.” Sometime after a particularly moving one-night stand, and attempting to navigate her life and bridge her isolation and loneliness, she meets sculptor Sandro Valera and his friends, a group of radicals and artists who offer her exposure to working-class insurrection in this “mecca of individual points, longings, all merging into one great light-pulsing mesh, and you simply found your pulse, your place.”

Reno was looking for a sense of identity, and she wanted enchantment.

“Enchantment means to want something and also to know, somewhere inside yourself, not an obvious place, that you aren’t going to get it.”

The bridge between life and art, and Reno’s invigorating speed of 148 mph on the Bonneville Salt Flats, (where she went with her new friends to make land art), demonstrates the crossover between gestures and reality, and a liberating energy that was “an acute case of the present tense. Nothing mattered but the milliseconds of life at that speed.”

On the one hand, Reno seeks self-sovereignty, but on the other hand, she inhabits a male-dominated and often misogynistic landscape where men exploit women for artistic and political gain. When she visits Sandro’s family in Italy, she is subjected to derision by Sandro’s misanthropic brother and his sneering mother.

In another scene, a male photographer asks women to punch themselves in the face until they are battered, and then pose for him. Reno narrates this with an unemotional but subtle raillery, noting the incongruity of women on a pretense of independence. She acutely observes that “certain acts, even as they are real, are also merely gestures.” And, in Rome, the question of feminine mystique versus male dominance is addressed by a Red Brigade revolutionary radio broadcaster, when he states to women that “Men connect you to the world, but not with your own self.”

Are women “meant to speed past, just a blur” as Reno speculates? And the more I think about that line, the more paradox it evokes.

Artists, dreamers, terrorists, comrades, iconoclasts, all populate this novel, replete with iconic images and fallen debris in a swirl of electrical momentum. New York and Rome aren’t just scenic backdrops; they come alive as provocateurs– firebrand cities with flame-throwing agitators.

Kushner is a heavyweight writer, a dense, volatile and sensuous portraitist of the iconographic and the obscure. Arch and decisive moments throughout the novel heighten the ominous tension that rumbles below the surface, and the reader wholly inhabits the spaces of Reno’s consciousness, and those of the people she meets.

“All you can do is involve yourself totally in your own life, your own moment…And when we feel pessimism crouching on our shoulder like a stinking vulture…we banish it, we smother it with optimism. We want, and our want kills doom. That is how we’ll take the future and occupy it like an empty warehouse. It’s an act of love, pure love. It isn’t prophecy. It’s hope.”

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 194 readers
PUBLISHER:	Scribner (April 2, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Rachel Kushner
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt Interview with Rachel Kushner On writing Flamethrowers
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Hard to find anything similar, but will mention this one anyway: My Revolutions by Hari Kunzru

Bibliography:

• Telex from Cuba (2008)
• The Flamethrowers (2013)

“Do we still know what it’s like to dream about the other side of the mountain? At what point does one cross the crest of forgetting? And this is when I think of Matias, who breached the space of the known for nothing more than a glimpse of the white-blind city on the other side.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  AUG 18, 2011)

I have seldom read such an extraordinary collection of stories, fascinating in their sheer inventiveness, subtly interlinked so that their images reflect and coruscate.* It is not entirely right to speak of stories either. Roughly half the two dozen pieces in this collection might be called stories in the normal sense, though some are no more than brief surreal hallucinations. The rest include several poems, two sets of dictionary entries, a letter and the reply to it, a news report, and a brief history of poetry in Cuba. All the pieces are ostensibly by different authors, collected by an expatriate Irishman who introduces himself in the preface and concludes with brief biographies of all the writers involved. All of course are fictional, even the author herself: “Ana Menéndez is the pseudonym of an imaginary writer and translator, invented, if not to lend coherence to this collection, at least to offer it the pretense of contemporary relevance.”

All this cleverness would mean little were Menéndez not able to write and have something vital to write about — but she does and she can. Listen to the ending of “Journey Back to the Seed,” as a senile Cuban woman in exile in Miami thinks slowly back to her birth on that scented island:

“And then her soul passing through a pinhole in the firmament, her thin thread-self forgetting that she had once remembered the pleasure of the body, the sound of the wind…. Nameless now she goes, tearing stars into time’s shroud, cleansed and purified for the journey’s return.”

Or, at the other end of the scale, a six-year-old boy woken by his mother to set out on a long trip:

“Children are the slaves of other voices. They have not yet mastered the first person singular and are always at the blunt end of someone else’s dream.”

This story, “Cojimar,” and the two that follow her are obviously based on the 1999 story of Elián González, the sole survivor of an escape by sea from Cuba, who was eventually repatriated by the US authorities. But Menéndez shies from telling the story straight: the first tale is suspended somewhere between the uncomprehending wonder of the child and the almost mystical fears of an old fisherman. The second is a comedy set in an officeful of Miami expatriates engaged in milking the US Government. The third is a Cuban press-release.

This technique of approaching a subject from different angles and in wildly differing styles is central to the author’s method. Few of the other pieces can be tied down so clearly to an historical event. She has mostly chosen to occupy the mind of the exile as a psychic space, dreaming alternately of escape and return. Images of transport abound: flight, wings, parachutes, balloons; boats, winds, and the call of the sea; grand railroad terminals, and trains speeding through darkness that never reach their destination.

The first story, “You Are the Heirs of All My Terrors,” a surreal nightmare of an old man hunted by killers in a station whose roof opens to the firmament, ends with a line that is typical of the whole: “With a great concussion of air, the train swept into the station, bearing with it the smell of the sea.” Except that there is no “typical;” Menéndez’ style keeps changing, and some of her most effective stories are barely connected to the Cuban theme at all. In “Three Betrayals,” an ordinary divorce case becomes an allegory of loss. In “The Express,” a professor commuting home from another city starts to reevaluate her life when the train hits a suicide:

“And now? Now she was whole, complete, content. She breathed and loved. She’d banished danger; but never again would she be invited to dance on its electric rim.”

Ana Menéndez is a wizard with English and a born writer. But an exile tells a life-story that has no proper ending, in a language that does not belong. There is an amusing trio of fables in the book constructed like a computer program that keeps looping back to the beginning and never ends. There is a small anthology of poems put into English by Google Translate; the original Spanish version of the first of them appears as a footnote to another story, and the differences are laughable, but soon the fractured English of the Google version develops a magic of its own. There is even a story about two Americans in the Caribbean written entirely in Spanish, with just the odd phrase of English, a pointed reversal of the way that novelists typically give local color to stories in foreign settings. I mention these things to illustrate Menéndez’ invention and variety, but I would not leave the impression that this book is merely clever and nothing more. Indeed, as I thumb through it now, I keep coming on passages that touch me again with their beauty, wonder, or sorrow. Reading this is an experience like no other.

*But then I have not read any Borges — an omission I shall soon correct — and I very much suspect his genius is in the air Menéndez breathes.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 4 readers
PUBLISHER:	Grove Press, Black Cat; Original edition (August 2, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Ana Menendez
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Last War

Bibliography:

• In Cuba I Was A German Shepherd (2001)
• Loving Che (2003)
• The Last War (May 2009)
• Adios, Happy Homeland (August 2011)

“Yes, Mr. Fuckwizard, we want that fully spunkloaded meatloaf of a ham steak of a dick.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn AUG 9, 2011)

Nicholson Baker has proven that he can make the familiar very strange. Consider his first novel, The Mezzanine, where a man is on a lunch hour hunt for shoelaces. All the odds and ends, the digressions and pop-up thoughts that can enter a desultory mind, are playfully and artfully presented in a readable and engaging manner. In Vox, a lonely man and woman hook up on the phone. They are able to talk about everyday matters and lure the reader into their idle chatter, so that the sexual banter is fluid instead of gratuitous. In his last novel, The Anthologist, Baker uses stream-of-consciousness to wax poetic and edify the reader on verse. His non-fiction Human Smoke, my personal favorite, is an exquisite tome that shifts the kaleidoscope on history’s sacred cows.

Baker chose a small concept idea for his latest, House of Holes, a cheeky plunge into lust and vulgarity so steep and rank, so exhaustive and consummate, that it is recommended to be read in small doses. That’s easy, as each surreal chapter is its own short carnal experience. Although some characters appear in several chapters, they are not immersed into a tight, ongoing storyline, except for Shandee, who finds a male arm, which is detached from its owner (Dave), and seeks to find the rest of his body. The eponymous House of Holes is the main character, and everyone else is a fornicating subject. People come to the House of Holes to make their prurient dreams come true.

Somewhere or anywhere/everywhere are circles that are potential portals—the end of a straw, the putting tee of the seventh green, the fourth dryer from the left at the laundromat at the corner of 18th Street and Grover Avenue–that will suck up (or down) and send the willing concupiscent to the House of Holes. There are no limits to what you can do with your anatomy at HOH, and Baker will provide infinite LMAO and OMG moments as you read.

I don’t think any author has come up with so many creative terms for the most sexual parts of our body: meatstick, truncheon, peeny wanger, musclemeat, length of badness, bulldog, cockpoles, hamsteak, thundertube, peckerdickcock, beast, frilly doilies of labial flesh, slobbering kitty, bungee hole, purple cometwat, slippery salope—well, you get the point.

Highbrow and lowbrow blend together, and it is evident that Baker is a scholar with a wanton repertoire of ideas. Some chapters are more “fulfilling” than others, also. For example, a woman nose-dives into a portal and ends up inside her friend’s penis. Getting out was quite the liberating experience for both of them.

In another chapter, a woman, Zilka, gets her clitoris stolen at an airport security check, by someone known as the Pearloiner.

“…we’ve determined that your clitoris is not a carry-on item…It’s swollen and oversized and over the weight limit, and I’m going to have to remove it now.”

Zilka sees it going into a clear plastic baggie with a numbered label on it. She seeks help from the House of Holes to get it back, as the Pearloiner is known to loiter there.

Crotchal transfers, temporary scrotal removal, sex with headless men, Penis Washes, Hall of the Armless Men Who Still Want to Fuck Twat—this is just a fraction of the dizzying booty in this book, just an ampule of the sex blasts of comic and twisted derangement provided between these sticky pages. Rather than read it solo, this would make a humorously lewd parlor game between trusted friends at a dinner party (make that AFTER dinner). You could truth or dare it—read a chapter on a dare—but I wouldn’t advise trying any of these tricks yourself, or with each other!

Take a ride on this “Pornsucker” ship or gaze at the 12-screen Porndecahedron of licentious delights. This review comes with a warning, however, something that Erica Jong once said:

“My reaction to porno films is as follows; After the first ten minutes, I want to go home and screw, after the first twenty minutes, I never want to screw again as long as I live.”

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 11 readers
PUBLISHER:	Simon & Schuster (August 9, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Nicholson Baker
EXTRAS:	No excerpt on this one.. we’d have to card you before you could read it!
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Anthologist

Bibliography:

• The Mezzanine (1988)
• Room Temperature (1990)
• Vox 1992)
• The Fermata (1994)
• The Everlasting Story of Nory (1998)
• A Box of Matches (2003)
• Checkpoint (2004)
• The Anthologist by Ncholas Baker (2009)
• House of Holes: A Book of Raunch (August 2011)

Nonfiction

• U and I: A True Story (1991)
• The Size of Thoughts: Essays and Other Lumber (1996)
• Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper (2001)
• Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization (2008)

Written his wife:

• The World on Sunday : Graphic Art in Joseph Pulitzer’s Newspaper (2005)