Adventure – MostlyFiction Book Reviews We Love to Read! Sat, 28 Oct 2017 19:51:27 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.4.18 THE GHOST OF MARY CELESTE by Valerie Martin /2014/the-ghost-of-mary-celeste-by-valerie-martin/ /2014/the-ghost-of-mary-celeste-by-valerie-martin/#comments Thu, 30 Jan 2014 13:08:53 +0000 /?p=25309 Book Quote:

“She felt she had been created by the demands of others, by their insatiable appetite for something beyond ordinary life. They craved a world without death and they had spotted her, in their hunger, like wolves alert to any poor sheep that might stray from the fold and stand gazing ignorantly up at the stars.”

Book Review:

Review by Jana L. Perskie  (JAN 30, 2014)

FACT: “The Mary Celeste,” (or “Marie Céleste” as it is fictionally referred to by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and others after him), was a British-built American-owned merchant brigantine famous for having been discovered on 5 December 1872 in the Atlantic Ocean, between the Azores and Portugal, unmanned and apparently abandoned, (the one lifeboat was missing, along with its 7 member crew, the captain, his wife and small daughter). The ship was in seaworthy condition and still under sail heading toward the Strait of Gibraltar. She had been at sea for a month and its cargo and provisions were intact. The crew’s belongings including valuables were still in place. There was no sign of foul play. None of those on board was ever seen or heard from again and their disappearance is often cited as the greatest maritime mystery of all time. There was nothing written in the ship’s log to account for the vanishing. ” (Wikipedia entry)

I was riveted from page one by this very realistic fictional account of the “The Mary Celeste.” The story and some of the book’s fascinating characters are quite eerie and mysterious. There are scenes, especially those at sea, which are terrifyingly lifelike. I could hardly put the book down. Many have speculated and written about the real life story of this ghost ship, including investigative journalists and authors, one of whom is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, a character here. There are many theories about her disappearance but none have proved to be true and none have proved to be false, either. For the seafaring families of New England who captained and crewed the ship, the nautical mystery has haunted them for generations. No one, to this day, knows what happened to “The Mary Celeste,” and all who sailed on her.

The Ghost of the Mary Celeste opens with a vivid account of a shipwreck in which the captain and his wife, Marie, are lost overboard. Back in Massachusetts a thirteen year-old girl, a relative of the ill-fated couple, is convinced that she sees and hears the cries of her cousin Marie.

The reader is then introduced to the Briggs and Cobb families from Marion, Massachusetts. The two families are intimately connected in an intricate sort of way, which I won’t try to explain here. Let it suffice to say that the Briggs and Cobb children are cousins. The Briggs family has always made its livelihood from the sea, however by the time young Captain Benjamin Briggs marries his first cousin, Sarah, (Sallie), Cobb, his unfortunate family had already lost many members to the ocean. Benjamin plans to retire his captaincy after his marriage. However, he does decide to accept one more command and Sallie and their two year-old daughter Sophy accompany him on this last voyage. Their son, Arthur is left home with his paternal grandmother, “Mother Briggs.”

It is important to mention that Sallie has a younger sister, Hannah, with whom she is quite close. The fey Hannah “sees things.” She has strange dreams/nightmares and is quite fantastical. “As a child she always had her dreamy side. She talked to trees and made up stories. She wrote sweet poems about the dew being dropped from the drinking cups of fairies, or enchanted woods where elves had tea parties using mushrooms as tables.” However, with the loss of her beloved cousin Marie, 13 year-old Hannah sees and hears Marie calling to her. Her family disapproves of her “visions and fantasies.” Sallie rebukes her after one bout of almost hysterical lamentations that Marie is there and “wants to come inside.” Their father is concerned, naturally.

Late-19th-century spiritualism plays an important role here. Spiritualism, the belief that the dead communicate with the living, became a fad throughout America and Europe during the 1850s. Spiritualism was a cultural and religious phenomenon which swept through the sitting rooms and village halls of Victorian and Edwardian Britain. Basically dead people were all the rage. Sallie’s and Hannah’s father, in particular, is worried about his youngest daughter’s fervent beliefs and visions. “It’s this insalubrious craze with talking to spirits: it’s loose in the world.” He fears that, as she grew older, Hannah would become involved in this movement.

Author Valerie Martin employs multiple voices, styles and points of view. She takes the reader through time and place, in a variety of means, to tell her tale through a straightforward, third person narrative, and also through her characters, their conversations, diaries, letters, newspaper clippings, legal court findings, ship’s log, etc. We are introduced to a young Arthur Conan Doyle, who, intrigued by the entire incident of the ghost ship, writes a fictitious and “scurrilous story,” supposedly told to him by a crewman who said he survived the incident. The actual story, “J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement,” was printed anonymously in the British journal Cornhill. The story sparked Doyle’s literary career. “He was thirty-five years-old. With scarcely a hint of what he might achieve, but driven by a furnace of ambition to strive in every field that opened before him. He made himself up.”

Doyle’s tale travels across the Atlantic to America where Violet Petra, a famous medium of extraordinary powers, reads it and threatens to sue Doyle for his lies about the Briggs family and the nautical mystery. And, Miss Petra, one of the famed spiritualists of her day, spiritual society’s darling, who is she? Has this inscrutable woman also invented herself?

Phoebe Grant, a journalist employed by the Philadelphia Sun is to investigate Violet Petra for fraud. The intelligent and business-like Miss Grant is a quick-witted skeptic who finds herself totally confounded upon meeting and speaking with the woman. They eventually become friends “of sorts.” She says this about Violet and her supporters,

“The spirits they peddled had no mystery; they were ghosts stripped of their otherness. In their cosmography, the dead were just like us and they were everywhere, waiting to give us yet more unsolicited advice.”

The books has several characters, the primary ones being Violet Petra, Mr. Doyle and Phoebe Grant, the ghost ship, and of course the sea. All the characters are eventually tied together by the “Mary Celeste.” The novel spans decades and the author fleshes out her characters and allows us to see how they grow and change.

I really enjoyed The Ghost of the Mary Celeste and am mystified by the mystery. Ms. Martin creates an extraordinary fiction from facts. This is a page-turner written with intelligence and originality. The author uses as much historical detail as possible and, in fact, at times the book reads more like a history than historical fiction. I was surprised by the ending. Although one has to use the imagination to figure out parts of the story, the finale is indeed unsuspected…at least by me. I am left with a head filled with questions. Kudos to Valerie Martin. I now want to read more of her books.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 25 readers
PUBLISHER: Nan A. Talese (January 28, 2014)
REVIEWER: Jana Perskie
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Valerie Martin
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

Another New England unsolved mystery:

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]]> /2014/the-ghost-of-mary-celeste-by-valerie-martin/feed/ 1 ABOVE ALL THINGS by Tanis Rideout /2014/above-all-things-by-tanis-rideout/ Mon, 06 Jan 2014 12:45:54 +0000 /?p=23885 Book Quote:

“Tell me the story of Everest,” she said, a fervent smile sweeping across her face, creasing the corners of her eyes. “Tell me about this mountain that’s stealing you away from me.”

Book Review:

Review by Jana L. Perskie  (JAN 6, 2014)

Above All Things is the fictional story of George Mallory’s third and final attempt to conquer Mount Everest. I am no mountain climber but those who climb and “conquer” mountains have always fascinated me as does the process these mountaineers undergo to make a successful climb. Years ago I read Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air, and then Simon Mawer’s The Fall and I was hooked. To me, Everest has always been the “Big One.” Mount Everest is the highest mountain in the world, its peak rising more than 29,000 feet. Back in the early 20th century it was a mountain that had defeated and/or killed all who attempted to scale her. Mallory and his team had made two attempts and failed. Unfortunately, today more than 3,500 people have successfully climbed the 29,029 ft. mountain and more than a tenth of that number scaled the peak just over the past year. On one day alone in 2012, 234 climbers reached the peak, (a bit crowded)….leaving their “junk” all over the mountain. As more and more people try to test themselves against Everest, often paying over $100,000 for a “guided climb,” most of the people with ambition to scale the mountain, and the money to pay, can reach the summit. Of course modern climbing gear technology and very experienced Sherpas make the difference.

But back in 1924 things were quite different. Many faced the mountain with determination and died making the climb without oxygen and battling the ferocious elements. Mallory joined the 1924 Everest expedition, led, as in 1922, by General Bruce. Mallory believed that, due to his age (he was 37 years old at the time of the ascent), it would be his last opportunity to climb the mountain and, when touring the US, proclaimed that that expedition would successfully reach the summit. The question is whether George really did reach the summit…or not. Historians will probably never know the real story. Mallory died on the mountain. But did he die returning from the summit or on his way to the top? This is a question that has plagued many people for years.

Howard Somervell, a close friend of George Mallory’s and fellow mountaineer who once attempted Everest, watched Mallory leave on his last attempt to climb the mountain in June 1924. Somervell said, “after the final attempt, Mallory had forgotten his camera. Somervell lent his friend his own camera. “So if my camera was ever found,” he said, “you could prove that Mallory got to the top.'”

In 1999,an expedition was organized, funded by the BBC. The purpose was to find Somervell’s camera. Instead the searchers found Mallory’s body. There was no camera, though, and still no answer to the biggest mystery in mountaineering: who climbed Mount Everest first? Opinion remains divided and the discovery of Mallory’s frozen corpse in 1999 failed to yield definitive evidence either way. You will have to read this historical novel to decide for yourself whether he made the peak and was the first man to stand on that extraordinary and virginal spot.

Above All Things is also a love story – actually a love triangle. Mallory and his wife, Ruth, loved each other deeply. She supported him, outwardly, in his endeavors. They had 3 children together. However, her husband was fatally obsessed with his love for a mountain – Ruth’s incomparable rival. The narrative alternates between Ruth, doing the housework and taking care of the children at home in Cambridge, and Mallory climbing and struggling on the slopes. She does want him to succeed but she is afraid, as anyone would be. She wants to live a “normal life” with a full time husband. The couple wrote constantly but as Mallory and his team moved further and further away from civilization, it became more and more difficult to send and receive mail.

The tension really increases when Mallory makes the final ascent with 21-year-old teammate Sandy Irvin.

Above All Things is a gripping, suspenseful and beautifully written novel….poetic at times. There are no spoilers in this review as the finale is history. Ruth’s narrative is at times heartbreaking as she waits daily for word from George. George, meanwhile comes closer to death with every page. Avalanches and falling ice, hypothermia, the extremely high-altitude, pulmonary edema, excessive fatigue, confusion, etc., were and are major causes of death when scaling mountains such as Everest. Many of Mallory’s team, who lived to tell the tale, recounted these hardships.

Tanis Rideout’s characters are quite complex. The extensive research undertaken in order to write Above All Things is obvious, and the real letters, salvaged, between Ruth and Mallory truly give insight into their relationship and characters.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 71 readers
PUBLISHER: Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam (February 12, 2013)
REVIEWER: Jana L. Perskie
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Tanis Rideout
EXTRAS: Reading Guide and Essay
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

Bibliography:

]]> THE CAT’S TABLE by Michael Ondaatje /2011/the-cats-table-by-michael-ondaatje/ Fri, 07 Oct 2011 14:00:11 +0000 /?p=21442 Book Quote:

“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: stars-4-5from 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:

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Poetry:

Movies from books:

]]> THE TAO OF TRAVEL by Paul Theroux /2011/the-tao-of-travel-by-paul-theroux/ /2011/the-tao-of-travel-by-paul-theroux/#comments Fri, 12 Aug 2011 12:56:49 +0000 /?p=20068 Book Quote:

“As a child, yearning to leave home and go far away, the image in my mind was of flight–my little self hurrying off alone. The word ‘travel’ did not occur to me, nor did the word ‘transformation,’ which was my unspoken but enduring wish. I wanted to find a new self in a distant place, and new things to care about. The importance of elsewhere was something I took on faith.”

Book Review:

Review by Doug Bruns  AUG 12, 2011)

How many travelers has Paul Theroux influenced, I wonder? If poets and composers and artists are prodded, pushed and inspired by predecessors and peers, why not travelers?

Many years ago, after reading The Happy Isles of Oceania, Mr. Theroux’s 1992 book about his exploits paddling around the South Seas in a kayak, I was infected with the Theroux travel bug. (I don’t know what else to call it.) My first adult foray abroad, after reading it, found me in Chilean Patagonia and there, surrounded by fellow travelers with rambling resumes of adventure as long as your arm, I realized that there are people who travel in a serious way in this world. Really seriously, with concentrated intent, focus and devotion. I subsequently devoured Theroux’s travel oeuvre, got my passport renewed, and set out for parts unknown. And then it happened. Fast forward. One night, while on a boat in the Indian Ocean, off the coast of the Seychelles, I became seriously homesick. It was, I realized, the night of my daughter’s homecoming dance and my heart was breaking for home. Only then, I understood, that not everyone can be Paul Theroux. Because one likes to travel, one is no more a traveler á la Theroux, then a day hiker is Sir Edmond Hillary.

Like so much of Theroux’s work, The Tao of Travel: Enlightenments from Lives on the Road, is deceivingly fun. That is to say, his writing is entertaining, his insights profound without being laborious and his style simple and breezy. But make no mistake, Mr. Theroux takes his travel and his travel writing, seriously.

The Tao of Travel is not a travel book, per se. It is a compendium of travel quotes, observations and insights accumulated by Mr. Theroux and collected into categories, framed by his editing and commentary. Here, for example, in a chapter called, “Travel as an Ordeal,” we find William Burroughs commenting, “The Upper Amazon jungle has fewer disagreeable features than the Mid-West stateside woods in summer.” Or in the chapter called “Travel Feats,” Mr. Theroux relates to story of Göran Kropp (1966-2002) who “biked seven thousand miles from Stock-holm to Nepal (via Turkey, Iran, and Afghanistan) and then climbed Everest….Afterward Kropp biked back to Sweden, being assaulted on the way by xenophobes and stone-throwing people.” Other chapters include, “It is Solved by Walking,” “Traveler’s Bliss,” and “Perverse Pleasures of the Inhospitable.” There are twenty-seven chapters total and every one is a gem.

Mr. Theroux writes in the Preface, that the book is “intended as a guidebook, a how-to, a miscellany, a vade mecum, a reading list, a reminiscence. And because the notion of travel is often a metaphor for living a life, many travelers, expressing a simple notion of a trip, have written something accidentally philosophical, even metaphysical.” The writing might occasionally rise to the metaphysical, but The Tao of Travel, the very physical book, is a tangible marvel. The cover is soft pearled leather, with faux gold-leaf inlay. And, upon opening the book, one discovers in the leaf a replication of the 1626 “NEW AND ACCURAT [sic] MAP OF THE WORLD.” To finish the package off is an elastic, Moleskine-like, book clasp. The book is not only a delight to read, it is a pleasure to hold. As a gift, particularly for the young traveler, The Tao of Travel will provide a lifetime of pleasure. It belongs on the shelf of every reader interested in the world beyond his or her study, which is to say, everyone.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 37 readers
PUBLISHER: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1 edition (May 19, 2011)
REVIEWER: Doug Bruns
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Paul Theroux
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

Bibliography:

Non-Fiction

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