“The bride stood like a pillar of salt, rigid under layers of itchy petticoats. Sweat dripped down the hollow of her back and collected in pools under her arms staining the ivory silk. She edged closer to The Bedeken Room door, one ear pressed up against it.”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowsky (APR 7, 2014)

In The Marrying of Chani Kaufman, Eve Harris discloses the secrets of a Chasidic community in Golders Green, London, focusing on the tribulations of three families: the Kaufmans, Levys, and Zilbermans. The Kaufmans have eight daughters, one of whom, nineteen-year-old Chani, is seeking an intelligent, animated, and good-natured husband. The Levys, a well-to-do couple, want only the best for their son, Baruch, and plan to settle for nothing less. The Zilbermans are facing a major crisis. Rabbi Zilberman’s wife, Rivka, is no longer a contented spouse, mother, and homemaker; she is restless, edgy, and depressed. Adding to the tension is the fact that one of her sons, Avromi, a university student, is acting strangely. He is secretive, stays out late, and avoids telling his family where he has been.

Harris goes back and forth in time, creating a well-rounded portrait of a community whose members prize tradition, virtue, and spirituality. If anyone deviates from prescribed standards of behavior–by dressing immodestly, showing too much interest in secular matters, or flouting religious law–he or she risks censure or, in some cases, ostracism. However, the author indicates that many Chasidim have a great deal to be grateful for: particularly the support of relatives, friends, and neighbors and the peace of mind that comes from knowing one’s place in the world.

The cast includes the young and not-so-young, the experienced and naïve, the affluent and those struggling to get by. We observe Chani Kaufman navigating the dating scene with anticipation as well as trepidation. We also meet Baruch Levy, a twenty-year-old who fears that he is not ready to shoulder the responsibilities that marriage entails. Manipulating the matchmaking strings is the smug and calculating Mrs. Gelbmann, a shadchan who relishes the inordinate amount of power that she wields. Readers’ hearts go out to Chani’s mother, a long-suffering matriarch who, at forty-five, has already borne eight daughters and is thoroughly burned out.

Ms. Harris is knowledgeable about the Hasidic lifestyle, and portrays her flawed and troubled characters with understanding, insight, and compassion. Her decision to relate events out of chronological order is initially bewildering. However, it allows us to stand back and consider complex situations from a variety of angles and viewpoints. The author presents the limited options available to young people like Chanie and Baruch. Should they adhere to the accepted laws and customs handed down by their parents or follow a different path that might be more to their liking? Chani wonders, “What was it like to roam freely in the world and not have to think about your every action and its spiritual consequence?” For men and women who find the constraints of a sheltered and choreographed existence limiting, the choice to remain strictly observant is a difficult one. The Marrying of Chani Kaufman is a provocative, enlightening, and engrossing book, written with skill and flair, in which the author explores universal themes that will resonate with anyone who has clashed with loved ones, suffered unbearable losses, and has had to make difficult, life-changing decisions.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 41 readers
PUBLISHER:	Grove Press, Black Cat (April 1, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Eleanor Bukowsky
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Eve Harris
EXTRAS:	Excerpt and an interview with the author
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Foreign Brides by Elena Lappin

Bibliography:

• The Marrying of Chani Kaufman (2013; April 2014 in US)

“The last time Ramiro Areyzaga was in Mexico was so long ago it was more like a fairy tale. . . A place of lush green shade, both a forest of trees and a jungle of huge waxy palm leaves, and a zocalo of marionettes and dancers, musicians and painters, with toys and balloons for the little ones and shawls for his grandparents. And of course the church, like none he’d ever seen, all the cool stone space, and God – which he never got over, so much so it stayed inside him, quietly, the rest of his life, like it was the word Mexico itself.”

Book Review:

Review by Devon Shepherd  (NOV 9, 2011)

Dagoberto Gilb’s latest book, Before the End, After the Beginning, although a slight collection, is loaded with insight and humor. It’s a book about identity, about the tension between limiting factors outside our control– our race, our class, our gender – and our complexity as individuals.

The collection opens with a disorienting story, “please, thank you,” about a Mexican-American man struggling to regain control of his body after a stroke. Uncomfortably dependent on the hospital staff, forced to face his physical vulnerabilities with tasks as mundane as taking a shower or balancing a checkbook, his psychological vulnerabilities also come to the fore. All he sees around him are minorities persecuted by a white majority trying to keep them down. Everyone from his adult children to the hospital staff shake their head, bemused by his racial conspiracy theories, but as his body heals, so do the lifelong wounds of prejudice, at least enough that he can advise Erlinda, a Mexican janitor, to rise above the ignorance around her so that the wounds she endures on account of her race won’t fester and leave deep and putrid scars.

While sometimes, an illness forces us to recede into ourselves, often times, it’s through our relationship with others that we struggle with undesirable aspects of our identity. “The Last Time I saw Junior,” a hot-headed Mexican must face his former self when an old buddy comes around and manipulates him (once again) into helping him. In “Cheap,” a Mexican musician is forced to face both his fiscal and emotional frugality when the pursuit of an unfairly low bid by a local contractor causes him to face the exploitation of other Mexicans, who he tries to help.

“Willows Village,” explores the other side of help – dependency. When Guillermo moves from El Paso to Santa Ana in search of a job that will support his young family, he has little choice but to stay with his aunt, his mother’s sister, Maggy, who, according to his mother, was “an all-spoiled this and did-all-bad-that” who got away with murder on account of her looks. Maggy lives in a tract housing development, called Willows Village, with a kitchen “loaded up like a mall gourmet store” and a bedroom as “beautiful as any hotel.”  Her husband is gone for weeks at a time on business and so Maggy manages her loneliness by keeping an unfortunate friend, Lorena. In exchange for room and board, Lorena does the errands Maggy doesn’t want to do and accepts Maggy’s capricious generosity with a smile and appropriate gratitude. While Guillermo pounds the pavement in search of a job, his dependency on Maggy and his mother, on Gabe, the man who employs him for a time, frustrates him, and with the wine always flowing at the house, it’s inevitable that tensions and resentments will come to a head, exposing the line between need and reliance.

Gilb explores the fraught dynamics of attractive women financially dependent on men through the eyes of the males who actually love them. In “Blessing,” a young man sets out to visit his high-school sweetheart, now married to a much-older man. Sexually unsatisfied, she visits him during the night, which prompts him to flee her house in the morning, putting him in the wrong place at the wrong time. In “Uncle Rock,” a young boy deals with having a mother who is beautiful enough to attract restaurant owners and engineers, but not white enough to be marriageable. With a precocious understanding of the sexual marketplace, he deflects a professional baseball player’s advances in favor of a man with modest means who worships the ground his mother walks on.

Perhaps our most poignant search for identity is in the face of death. In “Hacia Teotitlan,” a dying man journeys home to a Mexico that he remembers as a fairy tale with glorious churches. He rents a room that is too small for his body, and vows to discontinue his medication, resigning himself to dying with the same resignation of a stray dog. While he may not have found what he was looking for, he walks away with new ways of expressing his innermost desire – to be well.

Each of these stories is a wonderful meditation on identity and the pain we endure in the struggle to create ourselves. In 2009, Dagoberto Gilb suffered a stroke; these stories are the product of his recovery. Although judging from the simple power of this book, I’d say it definitely marks a return to form.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 5 readers
PUBLISHER:	Grove Press (November 1, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Devon Shepherd
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Dagoberto Gilb
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our short  review of: The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuña And if you like this one, try: The Madonna’s of Echo Park by Brando Skyhorse

Bibliography:

• Winners on the Pass Line (1985)
• The Magic of Blood (1993) 
• The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuña (1995)
• Woodcuts of Women: Stories (2001)
• The Flowers (2008)
• Before the End, After the Beginning (November 2011)

Nonfiction:

• Gritos: Essays (2003)

Other:

• Hecho en Tejas: An Anthology of Texas-Mexican Literature (2006)

“He wondered if religion was partly the love for an imaginary parent and whether any steps to make contact with this parent were justifiable.”

Book Review:

Review by Doug Bruns  (OCT 30, 2011)

Once, many years ago when I was living in Northern Michigan, Jim Harrison walked into the restaurant where I was dining. He didn’t so much walk in, in retrospect, as lumber in. It was the Blue Bird Cafe and I confess that I’d been hanging out there in the hopes of catching a glimpse of him. I was young, trying to turn myself into a writer, and seeking out an idol. Even back then, over thirty years ago, he had lassoed my imagination. Like, many other Harrison readers, it started with Legends of the Fall (1979), then continued with Dalva (1988), and later, The Road Home (1998), a book that changed my life. Much later, I devoured his memoir, Off to the Side (2002), then started filling in the gaps. I studied his poetry, for Harrison thinks of himself first as a poet–and of course there was the column, The Raw and the Cooked in Esquire and Men’s Journal. I used to read the column at the grocery store, between the frozen foods and the bread rack, returning the magazine when I was finished. (Harrison was a foodie before it became sexy, though his style in no way suggests an affinity to the current legions of balsamic vinegar-sniffing poseur journalists.) The man has no gap in his repertoire.

That by way of introduction and confession: there will be no objectivity to this review.

I wish I’d mustered the courage to introduce myself and tell him how much I appreciate his work, but that’s not my style and I image it’s not his either. How do you approach someone who has peered so throughly into your being? A man the critics cite as the progeny of Faulkner and Hemingway? A real died-in-the-wool man of letters? A quiet and respectful distance is the way to go, at least that’s what we do in the Midwest from which we both harken. Anyway, he was seated at the bar. Bothering a man at a bar is bad form.

It has been said that Harrison is that rare writer who can successfully blend the life of the mind with the life of action. It is a formula, though I am hesitate to use that word, that most often appeals to the male reader. That said, the voice he created for Dalva, a woman, in the book of the same name, astounded critics for being so spot-on a female voice–and this from a manly man.

The Great Leader falls soundly into the Harrison oeuvre. It is the story of a hard-drinking, female-ogling fiercely-independent male, Simon Sunderson. (Harrison’s men ogle without the uncomfortable squeamishness of, say, those created by Roth or the hormonal blindness of Updike.)  Sunderson, a recently retired detective, lives deep in Harrison territory, Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. “It was good to live in a place largely ignored by the rest of the world,” reflects Sunderson. Though now officially off the job, Sunderson can’t seem to call it quits and the novel finds him in pursuit of a religious cult leader with an affinity for young girls. Like so many of Harrison’s characters, Sunderson is not so much a reflection of biography as an amalgam ideas. Attempting to explain his current pursuit: “My hobby has always been history,” Sunderson says. “I became interested in the relationship between religion, money and sex.”

Sunderson, not without his personal challenges, is trying hard to be a better man. He misses his wife Diane who left him three years earlier, though they remain in close contact. (“With Diane he always felt a little vulgar and brutish…”) He is a father figure to a neighbor, a sixteen-year-old hottie who seems hell-bent on seducing him. (“The frankness of young women these days always caught him off guard and made him feel like a middle-aged antique, or like a diminutive football player without a face guard on his helmet.”) He drinks too much and is trying to cut back. He spends a lot of time by himself in the woods, thinking, walking around and resolving to make retirement work. His progress is slow on all fronts. He is wracked with ideas, but execution is haphazard.

There is a character in the novel, a friend of Sunderson, who ruefully observes “that a central fact of our time was the triumph of process over content.” That notion is at the core of the Harrison attraction. His prose, like his characters, is direct and intelligent, without many grace notes and devoid of filigree. There is, in other words, a zen-like transparency to the Harrison process. That process, the act of conveying content, is trumped every time by content. Pulling that off consistently, as Harrison continues to do, is a talent that is reserved for the best of the best. This novel is an example of how rare such a voice has become.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 4 readers
PUBLISHER:	Grove Press (October 4, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Doug Bruns
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Jim Harrison
EXTRAS:	Interview and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Disaster Was My God by Bruce Duffy

Bibliography:

• Wolf: A False Memoir (1971)
• A Good Day to Die (1973)
• Farmer (1976)
• Legends of the Fall: Three Novellas (1979)
• Warlock (1981)
• Sundog: The Story of an American Foreman, Robert Corvus Strang (1984)
• Dalva (1988)
• The Woman Lit By Fireflies: Three Novellas (1990)
• Julip: Three Novellas (1994)
• The Road Home (1988)
• The Beast God Forgot to Invent: Three Novellas (2000)
• True North (2004)
• The Summer He Didn’t Die: Three Novellas (2005)
• Returning To Earth (2007)
• The English Major (2008)
• The Farmer’s Daughter (2009)
• The Great Leader (2011)
• Brown Dog: Novellas (December 2013)

Children’s books:

• The Boy Who Ran to the Woods (Illustrated by Tom Pohrt) (2000)

Nonfiction:

• Just Before Dark: Collected Nonfiction (1991)
• The Raw and the Cooked: Adventures of a Roving Gourmand (2001)
• Off to the Side: A Memoir (2002)

“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)

“None of the patients ever ventured to reply to Helene’s question by asking how she was herself. Her uniform protected her. The white apron was a stronger signal than any of the traffic lights going up at more and more road junctions in the city these days, shining brightly to show who could go and who must stop. If you wore white you could keep your mouth shut; if you wore white you weren’t asked how you were. Courtesy was all on the outside for Helene and hardly tamed her despair, but it controlled it; pity for the suffering of others was her inner prop and stay.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (OCT 22, 2010)

In the original German version, so I’ve been told, the title of this book is Die Mittagsfrau, or “The Noonday Witch.” According to legend, the witch appears in the heat of day to spirit away children from their distracted parents. Those who are able to engage the witch in a short conversation find that her witch-like powers evaporate.

In Julia Franck’s brilliant English version (translated by the very talented Anthea Bell), Helene gradually retreats into silence and passivity, losing her ability to communicate effectively. We meet her in the book’s prologue as the mother of an eight-year-old boy, leading her son towards a packed train in the direction of Berlin. Before the train arrives she tells him a white lie, abandoning him at a bench, never to return. In the succeeding 400 pages, the reader gains a glimpse as to what drove Helene to this most unnatural act.

Helene is born into a family that defines the word “dysfunction.” Her charismatic, morphine-addicted older sister Martha engages her in an incestuous relationship. Her mentally unbalanced “foreign” (i.e., Jewish mother) is unable to connect with her two daughters, totally distancing from them when their father goes off to fight the Great War and becomes grievously injured. When the two sisters gain the chance to flee to Berlin, they grab it and train as nurses, exposing them to the pain of their patients and also giving them ready access to drugs.

Martha fits right into the debauchery and frantic partying of a decaying Berlin with her enlightened free-thinking friend and physician-lover, Leontine, but Helene is far more circumspect and sensitive. Her one enduring love is a philosophy student named Carl who also feels deeply and tells her, “The God principle is built on pain. Only if pain were obliterated from the world could we speak of the death of God.” When he is gone from the scene, she is unable to protect herself from victimization, occurring time and time again, with sexual predators and the cruel man she eventually marries.

As readers, we watch helplessly as Helene becomes increasingly detached, her heart becoming cold and numb. So it is no surprise when she concludes of her son, “…she had nothing more for him, her words were all used up long ago, she had neither bread nor an hour’s time for him, there was nothing of her left for the child.”

As the book progresses, the reader is forced to adapt an omnipotent stance; we know the consequence of some of the characters’ decisions and the genocide that will soon follow, but we are powerless to guide the characters through. Julia Franck instructs through omission as much as she does the details. When Helene calls Berlin to speak to Martha and gets no answer, we as readers are reasonably sure what has occurred. But it is never confirmed. As a result, as Helene goes numb, we begin to understand. And we begin to gain some compassion for an act that virtually all mothers would consider unforgiveable.

There is a menacing quality that pervades the book, becoming more and more pronounced as Hitler rises in power. There is no black-and-white morality or easy outcomes; there are simply all kinds of loss – loss of one’s sanity, loss of innocence, loss of love, loss of the natural order of things, loss of hope. The more the characters lose, the more they must abandon. In many ways, we know they are already as good as gone.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 15 readers
PUBLISHER:	Grove Press (October 5, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Julia Franck
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More Germans: The Good German by Joseph Kanon The Reader by Bernard Schlink

Partial Bibliography (translated works only):

• Blindness of the Heart (2007;  2010 in US)