Greek Literary Roots – 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 GEMINI by Carol Cassella /2014/gemini-by-carol-cassella/ Mon, 03 Mar 2014 12:45:24 +0000 /?p=25697 Book Quote:

“It is natural law that all complex systems move from a state of order to disorder. Stars decay, mountains erode, ice melts. People get off no easier. We get old or injured and inevitably slide right back into the elements we were first made from. The organized masterpiece of conception, birth, and maturation is really only two steps forward before three steps back, at least in the physical world. Sometimes when Charlotte lost a patient she thought about that and found it comforting—a reminder that she hadn’t failed in what was ultimately an unwinnable game. But if she thought about it too long, she had to wonder if her entire medical career was an interminable battle against the will of the universe.”

Book Review:

Review by Jana L. Perskie (MAR 3, 2014)

Gemini is an intensely absorbing novel which I found difficult to put down. It is a very human tale which delves deeply into subjects like love in its many shapes and forms, and time – too little time, not enough time, counting time, too late. The author, Carol Cassella, uses time to move her storyline back and forth in years, seamlessly weaving together the characters and the events which impact them.

The novel is narrated by two characters in alternating chapters: Raney, (Renee Lee Remington), an adolescent when the story begins, unfolds her life over the years. She is an illegitimate child, abandoned by her mother and birth father. Raney lives with her extremely eccentric grandfather, who adores her, in the small town of Quentin, WA, near Olympic National Park. He goes so far as to build an underground bunker, fully supplied for TEOTWAWKI, (“The End Of The World As We Know It).” Raney shows artistic promise at an early age and paints on plywood with house paint because she cannot afford canvas and oils. This girl/woman tells of her teenage friendship with Bo, a rich, awkward and shy boy from Seattle who is visiting his aunt for the summer while his parents are off somewhere getting a divorce.

Dr. Charlotte Reese, is a physician who specializes in the care and treatment of patients in intensive care at Beacon Hospital near Puget Sound, WA. She is a committed doctor, who cares deeply about her patients. Charlotte is in a long term relationship with Eric Bryson, a science journalist, who loves her but has a hard time committing to marriage and, eventually, to having children.

There is an important 3rd character here, one without a voice. Jane Doe.

Charlotte is on duty when a horribly injured woman is admitted to the hospital. It is 3:00 A.M. when the woman, whisked in a medivac helicopter to Beacon’s intensive care unit, is given into Charlotte’s care. As the patient has no identification on her she is tagged with the moniker of Jane Doe, until someone comes to claim her and provide the necessary background information. On arrival she has “no fewer than five tubes: one down her throat, another in her neck, two in her left arm, and one looping from her bladder. She arrives with a splint on her right arm, a scaffold of hardware stabilizing her lower right leg, and so much edema that her skin is pocked with the medics handprints.” She is the apparent victim of a hit and run. Her body was discovered by a truck driver who found her in a ditch beside the highway. He immediately called 911.

In the beginning Charlotte’s only goal is to keep her patient alive. Charlotte becomes deeply involved in solving the mystery of “Jane’s” identity and in locating her family. But as days and weeks pass, Jane Doe remains in a medically induced coma to allow her brain to heal while her body tries to heal itself also. Because her coma is medically induced it is impossible to test for brain death as it would involve removing her life support. So, the test would, in fact, kill her.

“Earlier Charlotte had had a conversation with her boyfriend, Eric, who’d more than once watched her throw the weight of modern medicine along with her single-minded will against all natural forces to keep a patient alive, only to lose in the end. Eric had challenged her on it that day. ‘Should quantity of life always trump quality? Maybe you set your goals too high.’ ‘”

When no one comes forward to give information about Jane Doe, an ethical and medical dilemma occurs. Ought “the plug be pulled.” Jane is assigned a professional guardian ad litem – someone to act on her behalf as her next of kin.

Gemini is set in a time of incredible medical technology, (late 1980s), when bodies can be kept breathing even when other physical functions are shutting down. New research in DNA testing and genetics began to emerge in 1985. Researchers did not understand until then exactly how traits were passed to the next generation. Genetics plays an important role here.

Gemini is filled with mysteries, so much so that I was kept guessing until the end…which is not predictable, at least not to me. There are family secrets, medical mysteries, and ethical dilemmas. The author carefully ties the characters and various storylines together and the complicated puzzle that involves the lives of Jane Doe and Charlotte Reese is originally resolved.

The title “Gemini” refers to the heavenly constellation of the same name. The star configuration is related to a Greek myth about the twin brothers Castor and Pollux. Both were mothered by Leda, but they had different fathers: In one night, Leda was made pregnant both by Jupiter in the form of a swan and by her husband, the king Tyndarus of Sparta. The most common explanation for their presence in the heavens is that Pollux was overcome with sorrow when his mortal brother died, and begged Jupiter to allow him to share his immortality. Jupiter, acknowledging the heroism of both brothers, consented and reunited the pair in the heavens.

I found this book to be one of the best I have read in years. The narrative just flows. I identified with the characters and the complexities of their relationships. I wouldn’t recommend it as a light beach read, however. Although not necessarily a “downer,” I found myself feeling terribly sad and thoughtful at times. But Gemini is about real life, and real life isn’t always an “upper.”

AMAZON READER RATING: from 65 readers
PUBLISHER: Simon & Schuster (March 4, 2014)
REVIEWER: Jana L. Perskie
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Carol Cassella
EXTRAS: Reading Guide and Excerpt
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]]> CARTHAGE by Joyce Carol Oates /2014/carthage-by-joyce-carol-oates/ Fri, 28 Feb 2014 13:42:44 +0000 /?p=25639 Book Quote:

“Shouting himself hoarse, sweat-soaked and exhausted— ‘Cressida! Honey! Can you hear me? Where are you?’

He’d been a hiker, once. He’d been a man who’d needed to get away into the solitude of the mountains that had seemed to him once a place of refuge, consolation. But not for a long time now. And not now.

In this hot humid insect-breeding midsummer of 2005 in which Zeno Mayfield’s younger daughter vanished into the Nautauga State Forest Preserve with the seeming ease of a snake writhing out of its desiccated and torn outer skin. “

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody (FEB 28, 2014)

Carthage is quintessential Oates. It is stylistically similar to many of her other books with the utilization of parentheses, repetitions and italics to make the reader take note of what is important and remind us of what has transpired previously. The book is good but it is not Oates’ best.

As the novel opens, the Mayfield family resides in Carthage, New York in the Adirondacks. Zeno Mayfield, once mayor of Carthage, and a political bigwig in a smallish town is the head of the family. His wife, Arlette, along with his two daughters, form the whole. Juliet, 22 years old is the “beautiful” daughter and Cressida, 19 years old is the “smart” one. Juliet is still living at home and she is an obeisant and sweet child, a devout Christian. She is engaged to marry Brett Kincaid, an Iraqi war hero who has been seriously injured in battle. He has suffered head injuries and walks with a cane. His face is badly scarred and he suffers from myriad problems requiring many psychotropic medications. However, Juliet’s love for him has never faltered. She drives him to rehab and stands by his side in all ways.

Cressida is the “difficult” child, always a loner and finds it difficult to look others in the eyes. Her parents have wondered at times if there is something wrong with her. She finds solace in drawing pictures reminiscent of M.C. Escher. She does not like people and is witty but sarcastic, cruel at times. She wears primarily black, avoids colors, and does not smile for the camera; for one day, she says, her photo will be her obituary photograph. She is an impulsive student in high school, doing very well in some classes and poorly in others because she thought the teachers did not like or respect her. She ends up going to St. Lawrence University where she lives mostly inside her head, continuing to be a loner, an “intellectual.”

In the book’s beginning pages there is an allusion to Brett’s temper and the fact that he has hit Juliet. She, however, has covered up for him by stating that she bumped her face.

Brett breaks his engagement to Juliet who is heart-broken. Secretly, Cressida is in love with him and one night she goes to a bar to see Brett who is not happy to see Cressida at all. He is drunk and Cressida gets drunk as well. He offers to drive her home but she never gets there. There is evidence of a struggle in the car – blood on the windshield and some witnesses who saw them arguing outside the car. What happened to Cressida? There is a huge search and eventually Brett confesses to having killed her despite the fact that Cressida’s body is never found even after a comprehensive and ongoing search.

Oates does a remarkable job of examining the fallout of Cressida’s death/disappearance on her family and the community of Carthage. Zeno never gives up hope that his daughter is still alive. Arlette becomes more involved in her church and volunteer activities, working on forgiveness and moving on with her life. Juliet is never the same due to the circumstances surrounding Cressida’s disappearance. Additionally, the reader is privy to the horrors of the Iraqi war including subsequent injuries and post-traumatic stress disorder that soldiers incur. Brett Kinkaid’s life is explored in depth before and after his deployment.

Thus we have the foundation for the novel. On another level, it is not likely a coincidence that Ms. Oates chose the characters’ names at random. Zeno is a famous pre-Socratic philosopher who is known for his paradox of never reaching one’s destination. If you are going somewhere and divide your destination by half, half of the distance will always remain. There is quite a bit about Plato, Sophocles and the early Greeks in this book. Juliet, of course, is the star-crossed lover in Shakespeare’s play, Romeo and Juliet. Cressida is also a character in a play by Shakespeare. However, “Cressida has most often been depicted by writers as ‘false Cressida,’ a paragon of female inconstancy,” according to Wikipedia.

The novel has some fascinating turns but, ultimately, it did not ring true to me. I can’t go into specifics without giving spoilers so I will leave it at that.

I try to read as much Oates as I can but she seems to write faster than I can read. She an an amazing and prolific writer. Even when she is not at her best, she is extraordinarily good.

AMAZON READER RATING: from 75 readers
PUBLISHER: Ecco (January 21, 2014)
REVIEWER: Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Joyce Carol Oates
EXTRAS: Excerpt
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]]> SALVAGE THE BONES by Jesmyn Ward /2014/salvage-the-bones-by-jesmyn-ward/ Sat, 08 Feb 2014 15:05:59 +0000 /?p=25113 Book Quote:

“What China is doing is fighting, like she was born to do. Fight our shoes, fight other dogs, fight these puppies that are reaching for the outside, blind and wet. China’s sweating and the boys are gleaming, and I can see Daddy through the window of the shed, his face shining like the flash of a fish under the water when the sun hit. It’s quiet. Heavy. Feels like it should be raining, but it isn’t. There are no stars, and the bare bulbs of the Pit burn.“

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (FEB 8, 2014)

This bighearted, voluptuous, riveting book – one of my favorites of the decade – is filled with contradictions. It tells an apocalyptic and ancient tale but its topic is fresh and timely. It is told without any pretensions yet it’s lyrical and bracing. It focuses on the microcosm of a family under pressure yet its theme is universal and its messages integrate age-old mythologies.

As the book opens, China – the pure white pit bull – is turning on herself, trying to eat her paws. The winds of Hurricane Katrina are gathering force. And the narrator, a young precocious and sensitive teenager named Esch, is realizing that she is pregnant. These forces and situations add up to classic tragedy, but Jesmyn Ward has other things in mind. Esch and her brothers – Skeetah, whose life and passions revolve around his prized dog and her puppies; Randall, whose dream is to get a basketball camp scholarship; and, Junior, the youngest – are a unit who support each other.

As Katrina closes in — as the internal storms play out — we view a world that is steeped with violence and tenderness. Nothing is as expected. Let me interject that I share my home with two dogs and every cell of my body abhors pit bull fighting. Yet when the inevitable scene arrived, it shattered every single one of my expectations. Skeetah massages and speaks to China like a lover; his rival coaches Kilo, the other dog, calling him “son.” Some of it is written in love language: “China flings her head back into the air as if eating oxygen, gaining strength, and burns back down to Kilo and takes his neck in her teeth. She bears down, curling to him, a loving flame, and licks.” This is a book that dares you to confront yourself at an elemental level.

As an added level, Jesmyn Ward weaves in the Medea and Jason story and other Greek myths. Esch is young in years, but old in wisdom: she already knows that “There is never a meeting in the middle. There is only a body in the ditch, and one person walking toward or away from it.” While she is tethered to earth – her father’s hands are “like gravel,” her brother’s blood “smells like wet hot earth,” her mind is unleashed and floats to the sky.

The tenderness – yes, tenderness! – between Skeetah and China, the bond between China and Esch (“China will bark and call me sister. In the star-suffocated sky, there is a waiting silence…”), and the desperation and love of this family elevates it far beyond most other contemporary books I have read. A day after reading it, I am still in its thrall.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 285 readers
PUBLISHER: Bloomsbury USA; Reprint edition (April 24, 2012)
REVIEWER: Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:
EXTRAS: Reading Guide and Excerpt
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]]> ED KING by David Guterson /2011/ed-king-by-david-guterson/ /2011/ed-king-by-david-guterson/#comments Sun, 13 Nov 2011 16:14:35 +0000 /?p=22095 Book Quote:

“In 1962, Walter Cousins made the biggest mistake of his life: he slept with the au pair for a month. She was an English exchange student named Diane Burroughs, and he was an actuary from Piersall-Crane, Inc., whose wife, that summer, had suffered a nervous breakdown.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (NOV 13, 2011)

Ed King had me mesmerized from the first page and did not let up throughout the book. It is a contemporary retelling of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex set in the American northwest. The protagonist’s name, Ed King, means Oedipus Rex. Ed is short for Oedipus and Rex means “king” in Greek. Ed’s middle name is Aaron and one could read into this, “Ed, A King.” There is no real subtlety to the retelling. The characters change but the story remains the same. Ed kills his father and marries his mother. It is a Greek tragedy of great proportions and strength, hubris and loss.

The story opens with Walter Cousins, an actuary, temporarily left without childcare while his wife is hospitalized with a nervous breakdown. The time is the 1960’s. Ed hires a fifteen year-old British au pair, Diane, and begins the biggest mistake of his life – sleeping with her. She becomes pregnant and they agree to have the baby put up for adoption. Instead, she leaves the infant on a front porch in a prosperous neighborhood. The child is eventually adopted by an upper middle class Jewish family and raised with much love.

Diane blackmails Walter for $500 per month in perpetuity, telling him that she kept the child and needs the money for childcare. The character of Diane is well wrought. She is interesting, beguiling, and sly to the max. Over and over she rises to the top only to be brought down by her own hubris.

Ed goes to Stanford where he is a math whiz. After graduation, with some start-up money from his family, he begins a company that is called Pythia and it is reminiscent of Microsoft, as is his character similar to Bill Gates. Ed also is similar to Steve Jobs in that he was adopted and has started up one of the most successful businesses on the planet.

Pythia becomes the largest data search company in the world and Ed is one of the richest men in the world. He has a thing for older women and, wouldn’t you know, somehow he finds and ends up with Diane, sixteen years his senior but still very attractive. His family is a bit troubled by the age difference but learn to accept the marriage.

During his teen years, Ed is a bit of a renegade. He likes to drive fast cars, has little use for adult wisdom and goes his own way. One day he is driving with his girlfriend and a man in a BMW gives him the finger. Ed is incensed and is determined to get the best of this stranger. Ed ends up driving him off the road and this man is killed. His name is Walter Cousins. This episode is an existential moment in Ed’s development. He does not know who Walter is, but the thought of having killed someone else makes him feel psychically ill. He ruminates on it and can not get it off his mind. He gets rid of his car and tries to move on with his life. His girlfriend can’t understand why all of this bothers Ed. No one saw the accident happen and, as far as the law is concerned, Ed is off – free and clear. However, he is punished by himself.

The character of Ed does not have the same depth as Diane. Aside from the existential dilemma posed by killing Walter, Ed has it easy. He’s brilliant and arrogant, filled with hubris. Diane is not only interesting and filled with adventure, but each chapter about her brings on new information that just whets the appetite for more. Ed is much more bland. His story is told from his birth to his death with adequacy but lacks the component of thrill that accompanies Diane’s life.

Guterson is a masterful writer. He knows how to rein the reader in and just hold him captive. There was not one page in this book that bored me. I kept reading with interest and delight as the novel progressed. I highly admire Guterson’s way of redoing a classic in contemporary time and still retaining all the aspects of the original that made it such a classic tragedy in the first place. This is one of my top ten books read this year, without a doubt.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-3-0from 83 readers
PUBLISHER: Knopf (October 18, 2011)
REVIEWER: Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Wikipedia page on David Guterson
EXTRAS: Reading Guide and Excerpt
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]]> /2011/ed-king-by-david-guterson/feed/ 1 A DARKER GOD by Barbara Cleverly /2010/a-darker-god-by-barbara-cleverly/ Sun, 25 Jul 2010 02:38:21 +0000 /?p=10597 Book Quote:

“The scream followed the unmistakable sound of a blade thrusting into flesh….”

“It came again, the same butcher’s blow, accompanied this time by a grunt of effort. A second piercing shriek of surprise and outrage turned abruptly into a guttural rasping: the gargle of a dying man whose lungs refuse to function, whose air passages are filling with blood. And yet the unseen victim went on fighting to snatch one more breath.”

Book Review:

Review by Kirstin Merrihew (JUL 24, 2010)

A Darker God is my introduction to Barbara Cleverly fiction, and I enjoyed getting to know her Laetitia Talbot, who reminds me of Deanna Raybourn’s Julia Grey and Tasha Alexander’s Emily Ashton, although Talbot gallivants and sleuths about in a later era.

It is 1928, and Letty, a forward-thinking Britisher, has just returned to Athens, Greece from an archeological dig elsewhere in the country. The man who sent her, her mentor, Professor Sir Andrew Merriman is a very accomplished former soldier, “digger, classicist, and writer” whom she respects and with whom she has maintained various kinds of ties over the years. She isn’t the only woman to do so. Both his professional and his personal past could hold the key to why he suspects someone is shadowing him. On one solitary walk, he feels especially uneasy that he’s being followed. It turns out to be Percy Montacute, a Scotland Yard chief inspector seconded to Greece. The two men served together in the military, and they catch up on the news. Among other things, Merriman explains he is planning to stage a version of Aeschylus’s play, Agamemnon, and hopes to get Montacute involved. Letty, another young woman named Thetis Templeton, the attache at the British Embassy (who is playing the title role) and other expat acquaintances and friends of Merriman’s will take part in the production.

A few months later the dress rehearsal for the play is in full swing in an outdoor theater near the Acropolis. Script on her lap, Letty is watching from front row center with Maud Merriman, Andrew’s wife. “As the sun set, the evening sky began to flush with grey-purple light….It should have been a moment of deep peace but, somewhere just out of sight, a man was screaming in his death throes.” As it turns out, the play’s killing of Agamemnon coalesces with the demise of someone in the company. By the end of that evening a real body — calling to mind the famous scene of Marat dead in the bathtub — has been discovered.

The Greek police and Chief Inspector Montacute are on the case. Letty is volunteered by Montacute to help him with his investigations, first as a recorder of witness information and then as someone whose familiarity with the Merriman house can ease the interviews there. But before twenty-four hours pass, someone else has expired, and that victim, breathing her last, accuses Thetis, who played the husband-killer Clytemnestra the evening before. Letty and her beau, rather agnostic Vicar William Gunning, find themselves in a swirl of intrigue, both political and personal. Letty is certain the wrong person is being held for murder, but how to prove it?

Behind aspects of the intricate plot is a 1923 historical event called “The Population Exchange Between Greece and Turkey” which uprooted millions and caused deaths that could have been avoided. In A Darker God, one man craves eye-for-an-eye revenge for the death of loved ones during that forced transfer, and he has targeted people close to Letty.

Cleverly skillfully weaves various strands of history and myth into her story: not only the recent 1920’s history, but also that from bygone millennia. She seemingly effortlessly incorporates the echoes of Alexander of Macedon, Agamemnon, and the overseeing “dark god,” Dionysus into her tale. She also finds place for the early twentieth century Eleutherios Venizelos, “world-renowned revolutionary, politician, and hero” and his “glamorous, mysterious” wife, Helena, as well as a few other historical figures such as the deposed George the Second, High King of the Hellenes.

With dramatic flair these figures each take the stage, either figuratively or literally. The story of Clytemnestra and Agememnon for example: “The queen’s affections were all for her husband’s cousin, Aegisthus, who had ignored the call to war and stayed behind in the palace working his mischief. The pair of lovers had determined that this bath of Agamemnon’s would be his last, and Clytemnestra, bursting with long-suppressed hatred and resentment of her husband, had insisted on delivering the death blow herself.” Cleverly grippingly works the Greek tragedy into her own plot. In fact, with a storytelling symmetry, the denouement takes everyone back to the amphitheater and Agamemnon, but the fates seem to have decreed that this production, like the ancient king himself, is doomed.

Love shows itself in many of its manifestations — blossoming, persevering, waning, extinguished — in these pages. Bitterness, longing, regret, as well as hopefulness and joy are expressed by various characters along the way, and we’re reminded that passion, adoration, and devotion may lead to heinous acts as well as to pure, generous ones.

Laetitia Talbot first appeared in The Tomb of Zeus and then in Bright Hair About the Bone. This, her third outing, will, one can bet, not be her last as she has unfinished business in Salonika. And that’s a good thing because it is a pleasure to follow such literary-laced, cleverly-plotted historical whodunits as A Darker God.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 6 readers
PUBLISHER: Bantam; Original edition (March 23, 2010)
REVIEWER: Kirstin Merrihew
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Publisher page on Barbara Cleverly
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: More authors to enjoy:Elizabeth Peters

Jacqueline Winspear

Deanna Raybourn

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Laetitia Letty Talbot series:

Joe Sandilands Mysteries:

]]> RANSOM by David Malouf /2010/ransom-by-david-malouf/ Sun, 24 Jan 2010 04:09:29 +0000 /?p=7460 Book Quote:

“But you will never get there,” she whispers. “Some swaggering lout among the Greeks would strike you down before you got even halfway to the camp. Think of it. Two old men in a cart laden with gold? Do you suppose your grey hairs would save you?”

“No,” he admits. “But the gods might. If it was their intention that I get there.”

Book Review:

Review by Kirstin Merrihew (JAN 23, 2010)

The background of Ransom‘s slipcover is velvety black, the Japanese kuro, “perfect black,” that, by definition, engulfs not just all frequencies of light, but also the senses. It almost mesmerizes and gives a feeling of sinking into endless depth. Silhouetted against this backdrop is an image that from afar isn’t easily identified, but up close resolves as a donkey or a mule. Why aren’t there two men depicted instead? Why this animal? Only by reading does it become clear why its shaded presence is considered so indispensable that it graces the cover.

“Beauty” is the name of one of the draught animals that pulls a cart bearing a ransom of gold from Troy to the Greek siege camp. Beauty’s mate in harness is called Shock and these two represent qualities and states of being that the King of Troy, Priam, and the great Myrmidon warrior, Achilles, experience. First one side of the equation: shock. There is the shock of the nine years of battle. There is the shock of the losses they and all their peoples have suffered.

Achilles’ greatest loss is still extremely fresh as Ransom opens. His beloved friend Patroclus — the exact nature of their relationship remains just as open to interpretation in this novel as it has through the millennia — was killed in hand-to-hand combat against Priam’s son, Hector. Having donned Achilles’ helmet and shield, Patroclus returned to the battlefield hoping to win, by his own combat, respite for the rest of the army and lost his life by that sacrifice: Patroclus, “open-mouthed with astonishment, stepped back a pace, then staggered and went crashing.” Achilles “had wept for Patroclus. Wept without restraint.” In a moving passage, the depth of Achilles’ grief bears down as he thinks, “His bones now, the twelve long bones, the burnt-out brainpan, the handful of splintered fragments they had gathered from the ashes of his pyre, are in the wide-mouthed urn in the barrow Achilles has raised to his dear friend’s memory. Where in time, his own will join them.”

Hector, a Trojan prince whom Homer considered the noblest of The Iliad’s warriors, does not want to fight Achilles but destiny has other plans. When Achilles mortally wounds him, Hector warns that Achilles will not outlive him very long. Achilles is not satisfied with the death of Patroclus’ killer. He drags the prince’s body behind his chariot outside the walls of Troy for days.

Seeing his dead son being desecrated repeatedly is more than Priam can bear: “Half-mad with grief he had broken from the scene and rushed down to the Scaean Gates — meaning to do what? he hardly knew.” He had said the final words and spilled the ceremonial wine for other warrior sons and he knew he must do so for Hector. The old king decides he will dress himself in plain clothing and together with a cart driver go personally to Achilles and beg for his son’s body. This, naturally, is great folly since the cart will be laden with treasure that robbers or solders alike would consider great temptation. Not to mention the notoriety an Achaean would gain if he were to kill the king of the Trojans. Hecuba, Priam’s first wife, tries to dissuade him. But Priam, who himself was ransomed at a tender age, is a man who sees the gods sometimes and one of them, the messenger goddess Iris, as she did in The Iliad, plants the idea that he should make this dangerous journey across the battle lines.

How then will Priam, the cart driver, and the two mules make it to Achilles’ camp? Can they have any chance without the direct help of the gods? Will the gods help, and if so, how?

Quite a portion of Ransom is devoted to the perilous movement of the cart from the protective city of Troy to the camp of their enemies. Author David Malouf’s version of this Achilles/Priam story has a simple hay-wain driver impersonate a king’s herald at the command of Priam, and this odd-couple team, together with Beauty and Shock, ford a treacherous river and pick their way as darkness begins to settle. Malouf dimensionalizes the story in a way The Iliad, in the relevant twenty-third and twenty-fourth chapters, did not. He shows the king learning to view life from a different perspective, as “out here, he discovered, everything was just itself. That was what seemed new.” Priam’s life has been about ceremony, being still and seen. The driver’s life is about doing. Pomp and circumstance versus practicality and simplicity. Priam sees a newly infused, sturdy beauty in his surroundings, just as he appreciates the steadiness of Beauty when the river currents prove stronger than expected and threaten them all.

Also, king and driver are fathers and in this they have a bond which is poignantly explored. Fatherhood, its pitfalls and pride, its necessity and heartache is a major theme in Ransom: “Of course he was in each case the source of their life, the forceful agent by which, in an onrush of manly desire, or out of habit or kingly duty, as he lay with Hecuba or with one of his many other wives and concubines, this or that prince had sprung into being.” Priam and Achilles also share the bond of fatherhood. Achilles has not seen his son, Neoptolemus, since before the war began. And that son will end up being the “bronze-haired avenger of his father’s death” when Troy is finally overrun and its citizens, including Priam and Hecuba, are put to death or carried off to slavery in exile. Will this bond be the key to persuading Achilles to return Hector’s body to his father?

In the night, these men make a pact. Here, Malouf changes aspects of the plot known from Homer’s epic poem. The starry but otherwise black night becomes a place of contemplation for Priam: “What he feels in himself as a perfect order of body, heart, occasion, is the enactment, under the stars, in the very breath of the gods, of the true Achilles, the one he has come all this way to find.” Beauty is around, in more ways than one. It won’t change the violent fates of either great opponent, but, in Malouf’s version, it is there nonetheless.

Julian Jaynes wrote in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, “The characters of the Iliad do not sit down and think out what to do. They have no conscious minds such as we say we have, and certainly no introspections. It is impossible for us with our subjectivity to appreciate what it was like….It was one god who makes Achilles promise not to go into battle, another who urges him to go….In fact, the gods take the place of consciousness.” Some pages later he returns to this warrior: “Somehow we still wish to identify with Achilles. We still feel that there must, there absolutely must be something he feels inside….And this invention, I say, is not valid for the Greeks of this period.” This fascinating but very debatable theory looks at the machinations of the gods in The Iliad and concludes that human brains back then interpreted every motivation, every action as a exterior god’s extraction from our human selves. We, on the other hand, being distanced from the ancients by so many generations of DNA and also being influenced by psychology and other advances of how individuals think, generally claim that thoughts and actions surface from our own mental processes.

Malouf is a writer of his time, not Homer’s, and whether he has read Jaynes or not, he chooses a middle way: gods do appear more than once and do prod human beings. However, the characters are not the puppets of the immortals; they possess inner lives, rich ones, ones that feel and reason. For the purposes of a fulfilling read in Ransom, this “modernization” of their consciousness can be thought of as a bridge between ancient storytelling and our own. Many fictional works today include elements of fantasy, but twenty-first century people don’t typically think a pantheon of gods plays with us as if we were toy soldiers, and so Malouf’s Priam and Achilles consider their options, their feelings much as we would.

The novel’s language is often hauntingly picturesque and resonates emotionally and mystically. This, for instance: “The sea surface bellies and glistens, a lustrous silver-blue — a membrane stretched to a fine transparency where once, for nine changes of the moon, he had hung curled in a dream of pre-existence and was rocked and comforted.” Malouf is a master of lyrical prose.

Not everything in this short novel clicks completely, however. For the ambition here is to lead the reader to more fully know Achilles and Priam and to eavesdrop on their mythic meeting, but Malouf, for all the ravishing pictures his words transmit still skitters over these men. He gives us glimpses into them, but, then, enveloped in the beauty of his words, doesn’t penetrate as far as one would wish. Achilles, with whom the novel begins so promisingly, turns into more of a supporting character than a lead, although he also experiences moments of timeless beauty and a degree of solace and acceptance in the course of events: “This morning, on the beach beyond the line of Achaean ships, he had stood staring out across the gulf and felt that it was not space his mind was being drawn into, but the vast expanse of time, at once immediate in the instant and boundless, without end.”

And as mentioned, much narrative is lavished on Priam’s journey. Although it does allow the old king to broaden his view of life, some of those pages would arguably have been better spent at the camp. The meeting — and some earlier areas of the book also — seems cramped and incomplete, as though Malouf felt self-conscious — in the modern sense — about expanding on those points that are pegged but also not dwelled upon in The Iliad. And that’s too bad because several times, the text almost cries out for additional insights.The cart journey is the part of Ransom where Malouf has permitted himself the most leeway to think about how it might have happened, and where he gives quite a bit of attention to the cart driver, the only character who really is his creation. The author notes in the afterword, “How a simple carter, Somax, for one day became the Trojan herald Idaeus, and Priam’s companion on his journey to the Greek camp, appears for the first time in the pages of this book.” Somax certainly isn’t an overall detriment to the novel, but Malouf could have written another book that had nothing to do with the Trojan War with him and a man similar to the Priam character if he so desired to concentrate on them. Since Malouf elected to write about Achilles and Priam, more about them and less about Somax could have benefited Ransom.

Ransom, in conclusion, is a fast-reading book that captivates with its language and provokes thought with its message and symbols, but falls a little short on shedding light on these two giants of Greek literature. Despite some opportunities for character building and story fleshing that were not taken, Malouf’s supplement to Homer’s great work is very worthwhile. It illustrates that looking into the blackness of the despair and shock of mourning and destiny can allow for a glimpse of the invisible, the eternal, and the beautiful.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-5from 26 readers
PUBLISHER: Pantheon; 1 edition (January 5, 2010)
REVIEWER: Kirstin Merrihew
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Wikipedia page David Malouf
EXTRAS: Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Another take on this classic poem:Ilium by Dan Simmons

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]]> LYING WITH THE DEAD by Michael Mewshaw /2010/lying-with-the-dead-by-michael-mewshaw/ Fri, 15 Jan 2010 02:24:49 +0000 /?p=7333 Book Quote:

“Her worst sin, it crosses my mind, may not have been her foul temper, her vicious mouth, or her relish at smacking around me and the boys. Her worst sin might have been her conviction that she had the right to bully us into doing her bidding right up until the end.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody (JAN 14, 2010)

Lying with the Dead by Michael Mewshaw is a novel about a dysfunctional family but it is also much more than that. It is a Greek tragedy, a morality tale, a story about the conflicting and diametrically opposed emotions that grip us all, and a novel about sibling love. The novel unfolds in chapters told from the points of view of each of the children – – Quinn, Maury and Candy.

Quinn is the youngest child in the family, born as an afterthought or mistake. He has managed to escape his mother’s tendrils by moving from Maryland to London where he works as a successful actor. He is a good son in that he sends money every month to support his mother, and he calls home weekly. He does like to dip into the booze more than is good for him, but then again, liquor can assuage pain and keep some of his demons at bay. Currently, he has been court-ordered to see a therapist due to anger issues.

Maury has Asperger’s Syndrome, a mild form of autism. He lives in California where he helps out in a trailer park. He has been released from prison after serving twelve years for his father’s murder. As the family story goes, he saw his parents fighting (again) and he couldn’t take it anymore. He picked up a knife and his father just walked into it. The knife pierced his belly and killed him.
Maury keeps “track of my memories in the box in my head. This box in my head is big, with dozens of drawers.” He never opens the drawer that has memories of his father’s murder.

Candy is the parental child, the caretaker. She is a survivor of childhood polio and walks with a limp due to one shriveled leg. Forever, she has put everyone’s needs ahead of her own and she is now the primary caretaker for their elderly mother. Candy has a lover now and is waiting for her mother to die, or go into assisted living, so that she and Lawrence can retire in North Carolina.

The children know that they must obey the family rules of shame, secrecy, and silence. “Dad’s murder, Mom’s mood swings, Maury’s crime – – there were so many things I was compelled to stay mum about.” “Maury and I had been raised as close-mouthed as a Mafia clan.” The family is laden with secrets, and one after the other get divulged as the novel progresses. As secrets come out, Mom plays one child against the other, asking each child not to tell the other about what she’s told them. What she says is often toxic and Candy states, “I don’t want to hear. I clap my palms over my ears.” Mom also has trouble with boundary issues. One minute she may be discussing issues of mundane daily life, and the next minute she is telling her children about her sex life with their father. “Alternately an Irish Catholic prude and an outspoken bawd, Mom has always had this cringe-making habit of sharing more information than anybody, especially her children, care to hear.”

What is the best way to describe mom? A piece of work, a she-devil, a monster, an evil and manipulative bitch, a cruel and heartless woman, a struggling single mother who is doing the best she can? All of these descriptions are true but none really get at the core of her ability to do harm to her children. At one point, Quinn reads an article from the “New York Times science section that examines the maternal instincts of animals. Its conclusion: cannibalism, abuse, abandonment, and neglect are motherly coping mechanisms.” He asks himself, “Is this the explanation for Mom’s cruel and contradictory behavior. For the way she alternately blessed and blasted me?”

From the time they were little, none of them could predict Mom’s actions. She was just as likely to act fiercely loyal and defend their actions as she was to slap or beat them. Dad was an inveterate gambler who came home late or didn’t come home at all. Mom’s mercurial temper and unpredictability were the ruling emotions in the home. “In winter she’s too cold. In summer she’s too hot. If it’s spring or fall, she hates the change of season.” This is a woman who is always unhappy and chooses to take her emotions out on whoever is closest to her at the time. As Quinn realizes, his mother is “clinically disturbed and dangerous. I didn’t know how to deal with it back then. I don’t know now.”

The children want to put Mom in an assisted living facility and she refuses. “Won’t do a damn thing any doctor, lawyer, priest, social worker, therapist or her own children recommend. She means to die as she has lived – – strictly on her own terms. To hell with everybody else.” In order to ward off or postpone Candy’s efforts to place her in assisted living, Mom decides to call all her children home so that she can reveal important secrets to them. She tells them that they need to come home to hear her deathbed wishes. This is her “final request.” As the children convene in Maryland, the dynamics become heated and desperate. As Quinn so aptly quotes from the Oresteia, “I know the ancient crimes that live within this house.”

Michael Mewshaw states that this book “has its origin in specific childhood experience that shaped the man I became.” In this sense, it is partly autobiographical. He is also interested in “murder and its ongoing effects on a family, the Greek tragic cycle of hubris, nemesis, and catharsis.” In this novel, he has painted a Mother who is not only a feared matriarch, but has a personality and traits that bring to mind both Medea and Clytemnestra.

Mewshaw brings his characters to life, with all their struggles and challenges, foibles and fears. His characterizations are so realistic that the reader feels like they are present in the room, like an eavesdropper right outside the door. How each of the children deals with crimes of the heart, as they try to relate with their mother for what is possibly the last time, makes up the heart of this deep and wonderfully readable novel. Mewshaw has a great gift for describing that place between “kidding and almost crying.” What at first sounds funny is often a statement of pain and cruelty. This is especially true of his descriptions of Mom, a Mom who “just keeps hacking away – – cutting you off at the ankles and the knees until you don’t have a limb to stand on.” Without these limbs, her children still crawl if they have to, never giving up in their efforts to connect with their Mother and each other in some intimate way. What stands out, is the strength of the human spirt and the infinite ability to cope despite all obstacles.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 39 readers
PUBLISHER: Other Press (October 6, 2009)
REVIEWER: Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Interview with  Michael Mewshaw
EXTRAS: Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

If You Could See Me Now

Bibliography:

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Movies from books:

Other:

]]> BEGINNER’S GREEK by James Collins /2009/beginners-greek-by-james-collins/ /2009/beginners-greek-by-james-collins/#comments Sun, 16 Aug 2009 23:35:20 +0000 /?p=4103 Book Quote:

“In fact, when seeking your own romantic happiness, causing others pain actually gave you a badge of honor. It showed that you were tough enough to do what was necessary for the higher goal – – your own fulfillment. No one respects a war leader who goes all soft over civilian casualties, and no one respects a lover who hesitates to pursue his beloved for fear of hurting someone else. In both cases, ruthlessly doing what has to be done earns you credit.”

Book Review:

Reviewed by Bonnie Brody (AUG 16, 2009)

This is a novel that is much more complex than it appears to be on the surface. On the surface, it is a comedy of errors, a love story gone wrong. Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, events intervene preventing their relationship from becoming requited. Yet the Fates intercede and somehow, as in a Greek play, we listen to the Muses from the sidelines as they let the reader know all of the great things and minutiae that occur every step of the way in this couple’s journey back and forth and sideways from one another. The author treats his readers as intelligent and informed adults. No part of this novel is dumbed down. It is intelligent and high-brow. It is literate and eloquent.

We are the reader as muse, sitting in the background, participating in the novel every step of the way. I felt like this book was a cross between Mighty Aphrodite, Pride and Prejudice and a Greek theater piece. I was riveted. I laughed, I frowned, I shook my head. How could so many things go wrong in what is supposed to be a simple love story? Oh, I forgot, the story is far from simple.

Peter meets Holly on a plane ride cross country. He always believed that he’d meet the woman of his dreams on a plane. It is love at first sight. Holly gives Peter her phone number and Peter loses the piece of paper that it is written on. He never stops thinking about her and vice versa. Years later their paths cross again when Peter’s best friend Jonathon marries Holly. The fun, chaos, thrill ride, tears and laughter begin here. This is a love story like nothing you have ever read before. It is a literary achievement of grand proportions. It is epic in its scope.

Jonathon is a cad but Holly seems oblivious to this. Peter is like the prototypical “good boy.” He does not tell Holly about Jonathon’s escapades and for some reason, he appears to accept Jonathon’s behavior. It’s hard to understand why he chooses Jonathon as a friend. Peter works hard for a boss who is just a few steps short of being Hanibal Lector. Despite this, Peter works hard and is loyal to his firm. Peter decides that if he can’t have Holly he’ll marry someone else and settles on Charlotte who he thinks he can be happy enough with though he is not really in love with her. She, too, appears to be settling on Peter. The cast of characters include all the wedding guests from Peter and Charlotte’s wedding, especially Charlotte’s family. There is Charlotte’s father, the narcissistic businessman who is married to the trophy wife. The trophy wife is not all that happy in the marriage which is quite telling from her behavior. The wedding sets off a comic and tragic episode that carries the rest of the story and leads to the grand finale where all the characters deal with their ethical dilemmas. Telling more about the plot would lead to spoiling it for the reader.

What I really appreciate is how the author includes the reader, letting the muses inspire us and the muses in us inspire the story, for don’t we know from the beginning what is going to happen? Of course we do. The muses take us through every little occurrence and every great step. I wanted to speak from the sidelines, give advice and narrate as the story progressed. In a sense I did. That is the beauty of the author’s style. We are part of the novel as performance piece.

This is a comedy of manners, a serious study of modern upper class hubris and detours. It is also a laugh-out-loud ride on the mild side. There is a poem in the story called “Beginner’s Greek.” I think it catches the sensibility of the novel quite well:

“… What is
Beyond analysis
Is perilous: we must not wish to seek
And cry
‘This is what I
Love, what I cherish!’ Instead, be wary of such
Intensity
That we
Never be hurt or happy or anything too
much.”

This is the essence of the book’s sensibility – – the repression and lack of expression of that which matters most, intimacy. Intimacy? Sorry, but that language is not spoken here. But this is a love story, a real love story, so we know from the beginning what will inevitably occur. It’s just the route that is circuitous, unfamiliar, puzzling and downright bizarre at times.

I recommend Woody Allen’s Mighty Aphrodite and Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice along with works by Aristophanes such as The Birds . These will augment Beginner’s Greek nicely.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-3-0 from 154 readers
PUBLISHER: Back Bay Books; Reprint edition (May 13, 2009)
REVIEWER: Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Publisher page for James Collins
EXTRAS: Reading Guide and Excerpt

A New York Times review of Beginner’s Greek
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Not quite similar, but close enough:

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