MostlyFiction Book Reviews » Obsession We Love to Read! Wed, 14 May 2014 13:06:32 +0000 en-US hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=4.3 GIVE ME YOUR HEART by Joyce Carol Oates /2011/give-me-your-heart-by-joyce-carol-oates/ /2011/give-me-your-heart-by-joyce-carol-oates/#comments Mon, 17 Jan 2011 17:36:39 +0000 /?p=15466 Book Quote:

“He had appealed to the officer who had discharged him. Don’t send me back to them. I am not ready to return to them yet. I can’t live with civilians. I am afraid that I will hurt civilians. The Lance Corporal was asked why would he hurt civilians of his own kind who loved him and the Lance Corporal said Because that is the only way to stop them loving me sir.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (JAN 17, 2011)

Give Me Your Heart, the newest collection of short stories by Joyce Carol Oates, shimmers with violence, actual or imagined. Reading these stories is like hearing footsteps in your home when you know you’re the only one there. They’re like seeing something impossible out of the corner of your eye and being sure that you’ve seen it no matter what your rational self tells you. The stories make your heart race and your eyes open wide in horror. They do not come to us gently. Joyce Carol Oates grabs the reader and pulls him into her unique vision where fear, panic, tension, death, love and murder prevail, often simultaneously. These are horror stories without any element of the super-natural. She’s the real McCoy of this genre.

This collection contains ten stories, many of them about the dark side of needing love. In “Give Me Your Heart,” we hear an ex-lover rant about wanting her lover’s heart – actually and metaphorically. We listen to her as she goes more and more around the bend. In “Split/Brain,” Trudy Gould has been caretaker for her ill husband day and night, spending all her time at the hospital. One day, he demands that she return home to get a journal that he forgot. When she arrives at her home, she recognizes her sister’s car parked there and imagines her troubled, drug-addled and violent nephew in her house. She plays out this scenario in head: she either enters the house and is killed by her nephew or she turns and leaves. What will her choice be?

Some of these stories deal with the obsessive character of love or the feeling that you don’t really know the person you love. In “The First Husband,” a married man stumbles across photos of his wife with her first husband. He can’t get over his jealousy and believes that his wife is hiding something from him. He becomes obsessed with her first husband and this leads to tragic consequences.

The theme that love is dangerous is apparent in almost every story. In “Strip Poker,” a group of older men in their twenties get a fourteen year-old girl to go with them to their lake cabin. They get her drunk and play strip poker with her. The game is tense and on the verge of becoming dangerous. How the girl turns events to her favor is a joy to behold in all its poignancy. In “Smothered,” a troubled woman with a history of drug addiction and rootlessness has recovered memories of her parents smothering and killing a baby girl. This memory is part of a sensational murder case that occurred in 1974. The smothered child was never identified and the murderer was never found. When the police come to question the woman’s mother, she is shocked. The memory appears to be part of a drug-addled incident in the daughter’s teen-aged years. However, the mother feels torn and betrayed as this is just another way her estranged daughter has turned against her.

Sometimes, the most dangerous person is the one that is closest to you. In “The Spill,” John Henry is what we’d now call developmentally disabled or chronically mentally ill. When he is an adolescent, he is brought to live at his uncle’s home as his mother can no longer handle him. It is 1951 and there is no such thing as special education in the rural Adirondacks where this story takes place. John Henry, after repeating fourth grade, is told he can’t return to school. His uncle has him doing difficult farm chores all day. His aunt Lizabeta has a special connection with John Henry while also being very leery of him with her own children. Her emotions start to get twisted up inside her.

“Bleed” is my favorite story in the collection. A boy evolves from closeness with his parents to distance. He leaves his childhood behind him. This is due to two distinct incidents, both involving child abductions and rapes. His parents question him about these incidents, of which he has no knowledge. However, these images continue to haunt him and, as a young man, he finds himself caught up in a nightmare situation consisting of rape and abduction.

These are not stories for the fragile or weak-hearted among us. They are all scary and they all play on our visceral fears and nightmares. Joyce Carol Oates is a master of this. She understands those things we all fear, the nightmares that are common to us all. That these stories do not contain elements of the super-natural is not comforting. It makes them all the more frightening.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 26 readers
PUBLISHER: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1 edition (January 7, 2011)
REVIEWER: Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Joyce Carol Oates
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read reviews of more Joyce Carol Oates books:

Bibliography:

Tales:

Stories:

Written as Lauren Kelly:

Written as Rosamond Smith:

Younger Readers:

Nonfiction:

]]> /2011/give-me-your-heart-by-joyce-carol-oates/feed/ 2 PORTOBELLO by Ruth Rendell /2010/portobello-by-ruth-rendell/ /2010/portobello-by-ruth-rendell/#comments Thu, 04 Nov 2010 22:36:05 +0000 /?p=13399 Book Quote:

“Our lord would have smoked if there’d been any tobacco about in the land of Galilee. He drank, didn’t he?”

Book Review:

Review by Guy Savage (NOV 04, 2010)

Prolific mystery writer Ruth Rendell’s work can be divided into two categories: the Inspector Wexford novels and her psychological novels. Portobello falls into the latter category and fans of Ruth Rendell know what to expect. The novel concentrates on the poisoned lives of a handful of characters who are connected to London’s Portobello Road, and these characters are as varied and colourful as the district itself. Rendell brings her characters together with her usual skill–although the heavy reliance on coincidence argues against the idea that London is, after all, a city of millions of people.

The novel’s first chapter offers a brief overview of the history of Portobello Road as well as a brief introduction to the Wren and Gibson families. A piece of post WWII good fortune allows the Wrens to move to the upscale Chepstow Villas while the Gibsons are doomed to the margins of society. The novel then bounds ahead several decades to the next generation. Gilbert Gibson, a repeat offender who’s now a middle-age sanctimonious, parsimonious member of the Church of the Children of Zebulun lives in a slum in a neighbourhood undergoing significant gentrification. He’s the “agony uncle” for the Zebulun magazine and offers exuberant moral and spiritual castigation to the sinners misguided enough to seek advice. On the other end of the social spectrum, fifty-year-old bachelor Eugene Wren owns a swanky art gallery, and his exquisite Chepstow Villas house is tastefully decorated with valuable antiques.

After a mugging, Eugene Wren discovers an envelope stuffed full of cash. He decides to place an ad in the paper asking the person who lost the money to call at his home and identify the precise sum. This act brings two very different young men into Eugene’s life–Lance, the terminally unemployed nephew of Gilbert Gibson, and Joel Roseman, a seriously disturbed man ejected from his wealthy home.

Rendell’s focus here is obsession, addictions and class differences. The have-nots such as Lance and his criminal pals are worlds apart from upper-middle-class Eugene Wren, but both sides of the economic divide fail to recognize the humanity in those more, or less, fortunate than themselves. Lance, for example, sees Eugene as “White Hair,” while Eugene sees Lance as “a non-descript sort of young man, all skin and bone, fairish, potato-faced but what did it matter?”

Eugene Wren is distracted by the contemplation of marriage to his long-term girlfriend Ella, a doctor, and so the meeting with Lance is just a minor aside. Lance, however, doesn’t forget the house and its contents. He stews over the high-end items he noted in the house and his obsession and resentment gradually grow:
”He was soon cursing the kind of people who don’t need to work until nine thirty or ten. What did that rich guy do for a living?”

Meanwhile Eugene experiences no small reluctance at the idea of total cohabitation, but this worry is superseded by his concern about his recent weight gain. To combat his spreading paunch, he begins buying diet sweets, and this minor habit rapidly morphs into a secret addiction. While Lance stews with class resentment, he’s under pressure to get quick cash, and Eugene struggles to hide his habit from a perceptive Ella. All the characters are set on an inevitable collision course.

The secret lives, obsessions and concerns of the various characters are relayed with almost savage delight but also with a faint whiff of condescension. While no one class of characters is treated better than another (Joel’s very wealthy family, for example, is quite appalling), the lower-class characters are portrayed in various shades of criminality–and inept criminals at that (at one point a chocolate cake is stolen and consumed). Fans of Rendell won’t be able to help themselves, and for its geographical focus, Portobello will recall Rendell’s novel The Rottweiler. Portobello, however, while malicious in tone is not Rendell’s darkest, and at this point, The Tree of Hands still reigns as Rendell’s masterpiece.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 39 readers
PUBLISHER: Scribner (September 7, 2010)
REVIEWER: Guy Savage
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Wikipedia page on Ruth Rendell
EXTRAS: Reading Guide

Guy Savage’s review of Tigerlily’s Orchids
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our reviews of some of Rendell’s outstanding stand-alone novels:

Read a review of the first Insp. Wexford in this long series:

and more recent:

Also, some of her books written as Barbara Vine

Bibliography:

Inspector Wexford Mysteries:

Standalone Mysteries & Psychological Thrillers:

Collections:

Movies from books:

]]> /2010/portobello-by-ruth-rendell/feed/ 0 THE COMPANION by Lorcan Roche /2010/the-companion-by-lorcan-roche/ /2010/the-companion-by-lorcan-roche/#comments Sun, 05 Sep 2010 00:11:27 +0000 /?p=11890 Book Quote:

“Trevor, you’re performing in a bizarre little theatre of the absurd. You’re play-acting and the script is destined to get weirder. And the Director is going to ask you to do something to make the play’s dramatic purpose clear. Something ritualistic and sacrificial. Something strange yet familiar, just as the lights are slowly dimming….”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate (SEP 4, 2010)

Trevor is a young Irishman in New York City. A film-school dropout with a checkered past, he is also a born storyteller whose life, both past and present, plays out in short takes of absurdity, abandonment, and aggression, with brief moments of wonder and wisdom thrown in — not an atypical first-time reaction to Manhattan. Voices speak to him in the soundtrack tones of James Mason or Bob Hoskins as he picks up the outtakes of his life from the cutting-room floor. And in calling him a born storyteller, I should also mention that he is one of the most unreliable narrators one is likely to encounter; most of the book will be spent distinguishing the truth from the falsehoods. As he himself admits: “We lie to protect. We lie to inure. To keep on going we have to lie.”

Trevor answers an ad for a companion to a young man with muscular dystrophy. The setting, a luxury Madison Avenue apartment, might come straight out of an Albee play. The young man, Ed, has his own suite, lined with sound equipment and well provided with CDs, LPs, videos, and porno magazines. His father, a retired judge, is holed up in his study; his grossly obese mother has not got out of bed for ten years, and the three communicate only by internal phones; only the cheerful pot-smoking cook Ellie is the least bit normal. For the most part, though, Lorcan Roche does not milk this situation for laughs, but as the background to tragedy. I was not surprised to read that he has worked as a male nurse himself, for these parts of the book have an undeniable authenticity. Trevor gets the job because he has the physical strength, an upbeat personality, and apparently some previous experience at a handicapped center in Dublin. The kindness and patience he shows with Ed, even when the boy behaves like a spoiled brat, is Trevor’s most attractive quality. But Roche does not stint on the physical details of the bathing, the snot-wiping, or the bedpans, and he leaves us under no illusions about the frustration and sheer hatred that even the most devoted care-giver can feel at times.

I have to admit that I had a hard time getting into the book at first. Trevor’s voice, though abundantly alive, is not quite as fresh and original as the cover blurb promises, and the relentless profanity took a bit of getting used to. The cover also promises that the book is “truly wickedly funny.” It is not. Despite the comic tone throughout, there is little to laugh at; instead one wonders what all this relentless jocularity is hiding. Fortunately, as the book proceeds, we begin to find out, as we learn more about Trevor’s past, his academic father, his snotty sisters, and his close connection with his actress mother, nursing her devotedly until her death. There is one scene where he talks with a priest in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, which serves as a touchstone of seriousness, in which Trevor truly reveals something of his soul. As it happens, he disavows much of this later; indeed the whole middle part of the book lurches about like a subway car rather than moving smoothly forward. But even those few glimpses of the real Trevor give one something to hold on to as the book staggers towards an ending that may shock some readers, but nonetheless seems absolutely right.

Let me end this somewhat mixed review with a detail that shows the book at its best. This is Trevor in Central Park on his day off: “I will watch as a distracted father releases an expensive model boat on sluggish pond water. I will wait in the shade for wind to blow slow understanding towards his overweight child who knows now the boat wasn’t bought for him.” Simply, even elegantly, written, this holds a sadness that reflects on the tragedy both in Ed’s life and in his own. Once Lorcan Roche learns to put more trust in writing like this, as opposed to his self-imposed role as an Irish comedian, he will become a novelist truly worth watching. Fortunately even the madcap ride of his first outing leads to some marvelous moments of stillness.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-5from 2 readers
PUBLISHER: Europa Editions (June 29, 2010)
REVIEWER: Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE: An article about Lorcan Roche and his family
EXTRAS: Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: More Europa Editons:

A Kind of Intimacy by Jenn Ashworth

Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio by Amara Lakhous

Bibliography:

]]> /2010/the-companion-by-lorcan-roche/feed/ 0 LEARNING TO LOSE by David Trueba /2010/learning-to-lose-by-david-trueba/ /2010/learning-to-lose-by-david-trueba/#comments Tue, 22 Jun 2010 22:05:38 +0000 /?p=10271 Book Quote:

“She takes aggressive strides, as if kicking the air. She is oblivious to the fact that, crossing the street she now walks along, she will be hit by an oncoming car. And that while she is feeling the pain of just having turned sixteen, she will soon be feeling a different pain, in some ways a more accessible one: that of her right leg breaking in three places.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody (JUN 22, 2010)

David Trueba has written an interesting intergenerational family saga translated from the Spanish by Mara Lethem. At nearly 600 pages, this book is truly a tome. Learning to Lose follows the adventures of 16-year-old Sylvia, a high school student, her father Lorenzo, and her paternal grandfather, Leandro. The book is also about a professional soccer player named Ariel. The story is told in chapters that alternate between the perspectives of these four characters.

As the book opens, Aurora, Sylvia’s grandmother, breaks her hip. Leandro takes her to the hospital for care. While he is waiting with her he peruses the sex pages in their daily newspaper. A particular advertisement about a “chalet” draws his attention. He has no formal intention of visiting this brothel but he ends up there anyway. Thus begins a sex addiction that escalates out of control. Leandro is obsessed with a particular Nigerian prostitute and is spending down his retirement in almost daily visits to her.

Leandro was once an aspiring pianist who tried to make it professionally but did not succeed. Instead, he ended up teaching piano at a prestigious Spanish school. The book talks about many conductors, pianists, and professionals in the music field.

Sylvia is sixteen and very insightful for her age. As she is crossing the street one evening, she is run over by 20-year-old Ariel, a professional soccer player who has recently immigrated to Spain from Argentina. Sylvia ends up with some contusions and a broken leg. Later on, Ariel and Sylvia begin a passionate affair. The book discusses a lot about soccer and this will appeal to soccer fans.

Lorenzo has just killed his cheating ex-business partner, Paco, when the book opens. Because of Paco, Lorenzo has been wiped out financially. Lorenzo is Sylvia’s primary parent, as his wife has left him for another man and Sylvia resides with him. We are privy to Lorenzo’s concerns about the police and his thoughts about the murder. We are voyeurs to his somewhat kinky sexual appetites. He worries about Sylvia but is not good at connecting with her. Lorenzo begins to date Daniela, a childcare worker in his building.

The novel raises interesting questions about morality, ethics, loss, love, and intimacy. The narrative is a bit blunted and not as fluid as I would have liked. I presume this is due to the translation. However, the reader will be kept turning pages, wondering whether Lorenzo will be caught by the police. Will Aurora find out about Leandro’s sex addiction? Will Sylvia and Ariel’s affair become public? If so, will they be harmed since Sylvia is a minor? There is a lot going on in this novel and I look forward to reading more of David Trueba’s work.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-5from 7 readers
PUBLISHER: Other Press (June 22, 2010)
REVIEWER: Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Wikipedia page on David Trueba
EXTRAS: Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Another novel set in Madrid:

Child’s Play by Carmen Posada

Bibliography:

]]> /2010/learning-to-lose-by-david-trueba/feed/ 0 JULIET, NAKED by Nick Hornby /2010/juliet-naked-by-nick-hornby/ /2010/juliet-naked-by-nick-hornby/#comments Sat, 27 Feb 2010 04:10:16 +0000 /?p=7978 Book Quote:

“Nobody gets forgotten anymore. Seven fans in Australia team up with three Canadians, nine Brits and a couple of dozen Americans, and somebody who hasn’t recorded in twenty years gets talked about every day. It’s what the Internet’s for. That and pornography.”

Book Review:

Review by Mike Frechette (FEB 26, 2010)

Nick Hornby novels translate well into film. Just think about High Fidelity and About a Boy, which have taken their place in the movie catalogs of many Hornby fans since their release. His latest work, Juliet, Naked, seems to possess the same potential. Well, the first scene does anyway, which would make a great opening shot: a forty-year-old Brit having his photo taken at a urinal in a Minneapolis club where his musical hero decided to stop writing songs in 1986. The photographer in this scene, Annie, has accompanied her – “Partner? Life Partner? Friend?” – of fifteen years, Duncan, to America. On a quasi-religious pilgrimage, they visit singer-songwriter Tucker Crowe’s points of interest – birthplace, career-ending urinal, and home of the beautiful woman who inspired Tucker’s greatest album, Juliet.

For most, unhealthy obsession with art and musicians ends shortly after adolescence – or at least right after college. However, Duncan cannot let go, a point of growing contention with Annie. When they were first introduced, they “fell upon each other with relief,” the only two sophisticated souls in the grim English seaside town of Gooleness. Now years later in a frustrating, long-stale cohabitation, they are “stuck in a perpetual postgraduate world where gigs and books and films mattered more to them than they did to other people of their age.”

Tucker Crowe has lived a reclusive life in Pennsylvania since shortly after the infamous urinal incident of 1986. Although his catalog of albums stopped growing long ago, his fertility rate has not suffered. He has spent the last twenty years or so collecting ex-wives, ignoring his brood of estranged children, and recovering from alcoholism. His reclusiveness has lent itself well to wild speculation from the obsessed, self-fashioned experts like Duncan – Crowologists as they call themselves. While most men Duncan’s age reproduce and rear children, he spends his leisure time endlessly chatting on the less-than-official Tucker Crowe website. When Crowe breaks his decades-long silence and releases stripped-down, acoustic demos of the Juliet tracks, Annie – in an act of pent up betrayal – posts a review to rival and contradict Duncan’s overdone, highly biased one. Crowe responds favorably to one of them, which, combined with Duncan’s own act of infidelity, puts the plot in motion in what will most definitely be celebrated as a Nick Hornby classic.

As with all Hornby books, what stands out in Juliet, Naked is the nearly perfect blend of humor and soulfulness. In particular, Tucker’s clumsy attempts at pacifying the fears of his six-year-old son Jackson are especially heartwarming and funny. Jackson becomes frightened at Tucker’s mention of guns in an airport security line, to which Tucker responds: “Sometimes bad guys take guns on planes…to rob rich people. But we’re not rich…Rich people wear stupid watches and smell nice. We’re not wearing watches, and we smell bad.”

At the same time, Hornby does not shy away from the existential despair at the heart of the contemporary human experience – or at least the American and British one. Images of absence appear regularly throughout the story, calling attention to the void in the lives of each of these characters, especially Annie and Duncan. At the center of their relationship is essentially nothing except a stale, mind-numbing familiarity – there is no love, marriage, or children. As Annie regretfully admits, she “and Duncan had both managed to create an empty space, a complicated one, with all sorts of tricky corners and odd bumps and surprising indents, like a jigsaw piece.” The only thing redeeming about these absences and this emptiness is that they “had made her think,” which proves to be her first step in extricating herself from such a dissatisfying existence. Hornby’s imagery provokes the reader to think as well, making what could be just a lighthearted funny tale into an also serious exploration of the human condition.

On a separate note, reviewers will be delighted to know that Hornby also gives them a nod in this latest story, addressing the very act of reviewing itself. In perusing the Tucker Crowe website after Duncan posts her review, Annie begins contemplating the futility of writing about and reviewing someone else’s art, especially on a website that only a handful of people visit. She asks herself, “Why had she bothered? Why does anybody?” This moment quickly passes, though. She realizes that, despite the futility, “she was for bothering, on the whole; in which case thank you…everybody else, on every other website.” You’re welcome, Annie.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 81 readers
PUBLISHER: Riverhead Hardcover (September 29, 2009)
REVIEWER: Mike Frechette
AMAZON PAGE: Juliet, Naked
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Nick Hornby

Wikipedia page on Nick Hornby
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: This reminds me of:

The Song is You by Arthur Phillips

Bibliography:

Nonfiction:

Movies from books:

]]> /2010/juliet-naked-by-nick-hornby/feed/ 0