Unreliable Narrator – MostlyFiction Book Reviews We Love to Read! Sat, 28 Oct 2017 19:51:27 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.4.18 THE ORPHAN CHOIR by Sophie Hannah /2014/the-orphan-choir-by-sophie-hannah/ Thu, 13 Feb 2014 13:58:30 +0000 /?p=25695 Book Quote:

“It’s quarter to midnight. I’m standing in the rain outside my next-door neighbor’s house, gripping his rusted railings with cold, wet hands, staring down through them at the misshapen and perilously narrow stone steps leading to his converted basement, from which noise is blaring. It’s my least favorite song in the world: Queen’s ‘Don’t Stop Me Now.’ ”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowsky  (FEB 13, 2014)

In Sophie Hannah’s The Orphan Choir, forty-one year old Louise Beeston may be on the verge of an emotional breakdown. Her creepy next-door neighbor, Justin Clay, plays loud music late at night, usually every other weekend. Although Louise has repeatedly implored him to stop, Clay is indifferent to her pleas. (Louise’s husband, Stuart, is oblivious to the cacophony. Even if a freight train were to pass through their bedroom, Stuart would remain asleep.) Unfortunately, Louise has little hope that Clay, a pot-smoking party animal who enjoys living it up with his loud-mouthed friends, will change his ways.

Adding to her distress is Stuart’s plan to sandblast the exterior of their sooty Cambridge home. The workman her husband hired plans to cover and seal their windows, leaving them without natural light for at least three weeks. In addition, the sandblasting will kick up a great deal of dust. All this would be bearable if Louise’s only child, seven-year-old son, Joseph, were living with them. Instead, he is a junior probationer boarding at Saviour College School, an elite educational institution that trains promising youngsters to sing religious choral music. Although Louise and Stuart see their son regularly, Joseph spends most of his time away from home. Louise hates this arrangement; she misses Joseph terribly. Stuart, on the other hand, argues that their child is happy and thriving, and should remain where he is.

As Louise narrates her tale of woe, we gradually start to wonder if she is completely sane. She admits that she is sleep-deprived, irritable, and resentful. Louise and her husband quarrel frequently and she soon becomes too distraught to go to work. Moreover, she is having troubling visions: She sees and hears a choir of children similar to her son’s, except that this group includes girls. Is Louise hallucinating? Or does this “visitation” have a deeper meaning?

The Orphan Choir is relatively brief, yet extremely vivid and powerful. The author is clever but not self-consciously so, and she uses foreshadowing skillfully to hint that everything is not as it seems. Hannah’s hard-hitting dialogue, adept use of setting, and wonderful feel for language add to the novel’s potency. We sympathize with the exhausted, frustrated, and high-strung heroine, and hope that she will somehow find the peace of mind she craves. Leave it to the talented and creative Sophie Hannah to spring some big surprises at the conclusion of this engrossing and eerie psychological thriller; the riveting finale will knock your socks off.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-3-0from 16 readers
PUBLISHER: Picador (January 28, 2014)
REVIEWER: Eleanor Bukowsky
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Sophie Hannah
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

Bibliography:

Zailer & Waterhouse Mysteries:

Note: Sophie Hannah is also an accomplished poet, see her website for more information on her poetry books.

]]> ANDREW’S BRAIN by E.L. Doctorow /2014/andrews-brain-by-e-l-doctorow/ Thu, 09 Jan 2014 12:45:44 +0000 /?p=23893 Book Quote:

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

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  (JAN 9, 2014)

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

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

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

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

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

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 18 readers
PUBLISHER: Random House (January 14, 2014)
REVIEWER: Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: E.L. Doctorow
EXTRAS: Reading Guide
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

Bibliography:

Movies from books:

]]> PIG’S FOOT by Carlos Acosta /2013/pigs-foot-by-carlos-acosta/ Sun, 29 Dec 2013 16:45:35 +0000 /?p=24013 Book Quote:

“How can anyone who does not know their history truly know who they are.”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte  (DEC 29, 2013)

Oscar Kortico might be living in the slums of Havana now but the story he narrates is one of voluptuous plenty — populated by a vast array of colorful characters in a seemingly idyllic setting. “In the 1800s Pata de Puerco was just one small corner of a sweeping plain with a few scattered shacks between the Sierra Maestra mountains of Santiago de Cuba and the copper mines of El Cobre,” Kortico says, as he describes the Cuban village where his grandparents settled. Oscar has never actually been to Pata de Puerco (translated as Pig’s Foot) but instead relies on memories handed down over generations to paint a picture of the town and the events that eventually lead to his beaten down existence in a shantytown. Nostalgia invariably wears rose-colored glasses so it is that the small town with its slow pace of daily life casts a delightful shadow and creates a sense of longing — even if the events that transpired there were often riven by violence and vengeance.

The author Carlos Acosta, is a world-famous dancer, and in fact bears a great deal of resemblance to the polymath, Melecio, in the book, one of Oscar’s relatives. Acosta nimbly weaves threads of magic realism in his novel and the able translation makes the story come alive. The old-fashioned “once upon a time” narration dispenses with gimmicks (at least in the beginning) and makes for an arresting and page-turning read.

Acosta sets his story from the early 1800s and sprinkles peeks into the country’s history as he goes along. We get brief (very brief) glimpses into the war of independence in 1868; the USS Maine incident in Havana harbor (in 1898) all the way to more contemporary times. An occasional jab at Cuba’s political climate is thrown around: “An island the size of a sardine can’t govern itself, that one way or another it is dependent on the whale in order to thrive,” but Acosta doesn’t really stray too far from the script. Sometimes one wishes for a more intimate working of these political events into the story but perhaps Acosta’s point is precisely that political events often serve only as a backdrop against which the theater of life unfolds.

The end is intentionally ambiguous — one wonders whether it is meant to cast a shadow over the verity of the narrated events or to question the place of history in our lives. “My grandfather said I didn’t know what I was talking about, that for all its faults Cuba was much better today than it had been, that young people these days knew nothing about history and spent their lives complaining, not realizing how much worse things used to be,” Oscar says towards the end. It seems for all the talk of history, not much is easily remembered or its lessons at least, seem to be appropriately diluted, ready for easy consumption. It is perhaps true, Acosta seems to say in his compelling novel, that as Napoleon once said, history is but a set of lies people have agreed upon.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-5-0 from 2 readers
PUBLISHER: Bloomsbury USA (January 14, 2014)
REVIEWER: Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Carlos Acosta
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: More Cuba:

Bibliography:

Nonfiction:

Related:

]]> LOST MEMORY OF SKIN by Russell Banks /2011/lost-memory-of-skin-by-russell-banks/ Tue, 27 Sep 2011 13:05:44 +0000 /?p=21235 Book Quote:

“The Kid reminds the Professor of Huckleberry Finn somehow. Here he is now, long after he lit out for the Territory, grown older and as deep into the Territory as you can go…and there’s no farther place he can run to. The Professor wants to know what happened to the ignorant, abused, honest American boy between the end of the book and now…[H]ow did he come years later to having ‘no money, no job, no legal squat’? In twenty-first-century America.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (SEP 27, 2011)

The main character of Banks’ new novel, a twenty-two-year-old registered sex offender in South Florida known only as “the Kid,” may initially repel readers. The Kid is recently out of jail and on ten-year probation in fictional Calusa County, and is required to wear a GPS after soliciting sex from an underage girl. Ironically, he is still a virgin.

The Kid cannot leave the county, but he also cannot reside within 2,500 feet from any place children would congregate. That leaves three options—the swamplands, the airport area, or the Causeway. He chooses the Causeway and meets other sex offenders, a seriously motley crew, who consciously isolate from each other as a group. He befriends one old man, the Rabbit, but sticks to his tent, his bicycle, and his alligator-size pet iguana, Iggy. Later, he procures a Bible.

These disenfranchised convicts are enough to make readers squirm. Moreover, in the back of the reader’s mind is the question of whether authorial intrusion will be employed in an attempt to manipulate the reader into sympathizing with these outcasts. It takes a master storyteller, one who can circumnavigate the ick factor, or, rather, subsume it into a morally complex and irresistible reading experience, to lure the wary, veteran reader.

Banks’ artful narrative eases us in slowly and deftly breaks down resistance, piercing the wall of repugnance. It infiltrates bias, reinforced by social bias, and allows you to eclipse antipathy and enter the sphere of the damned. A willing reader ultimately discovers a captivating story, and reaches a crest of understanding for one young man without needing to accept him.

An illegal police raid on the Causeway, provoked by hatred and politics, disrupts the Kid’s relatively peaceful life early on, and now he has nowhere to turn. Subsequently, a hurricane wipes out the makeshift homes of the inhabitants. The kid becomes a migrant, shuffling within the legal radius of permitted locales. At about this time, he meets the Professor, who the Kid calls “Haystack,” an obese sociologist at the local university who is the size and intellect of a mountain, an enigmatic man with a past of shady government work and espionage. He is conducting a study of homelessness and particularly the homeless, convicted sex offender population.

The Professor offers the Kid financial and practical assistance in exchange for a series of taped interviews. He aims to help the Kid gain control and understanding over his life, to empower him to move beyond his pedophilia. They form a partnership of sorts, but the Kid remains leery of the Professor and his agenda. The Professor’s opaque past, his admitted secrets and lies, marks him as an unreliable narrator. Or does it? Later, perilous developments radically alter their relationship, a fitting move on the author’s part that provides sharp contrasts and deeper characterization.

Sex offenders are the criminal group most collectivized into one category of “monsters.” Banks takes a monster and probes below the surface of reflexive response. There is no attempt to defend the Kid’s crime or apologize for it. We see a lot of the events through his eyes, and decide whether he is reliable or not. He acquires an undernourished, skulking yellow dog and a crusty old grey parrot with clipped wings and a salty tongue. His relationship with these animals is rendered without a lick of sentimentality, but it bestows the most resonant and powerful feelings in the reader compared to anywhere else in the book. The care and feeding of dependents bring out the Kid’s protective instincts and help keep him focused.

The book is divided into five parts. Along the way, Banks dips into rhetorical digressions on sex, pornography, geography, and human nature, slowing down the momentum and disengaging the tension. These intervals are formal and stiff, although they are eventually braided into the story at large. However, despite these static flourishes, the story progresses with confidence and strength.

Most characters, whether stand-up citizens or sex offenders, have a moniker, which deliberately mechanizes them, but between the author and reader, humanization occurs between the pages. There’s Shyster, the pedophilic, disbarred lawyer and ex-Senator; Otis, the Rabbit, an elderly, disabled member of the tribe; and a Hemingway-esque character, the Writer, who incidentally resembles Banks himself; and others who personify their names.

Overall, the languid pace of the novel requires steadfast patience, but commitment to it has a fine payoff. Readers are rewarded with a thrilling denouement and a pensive but provocative ending. It inspires contemplation and dynamic discussion, and makes you think utterly outside the box.

AMAZON READER RATING: from 112 readers
PUBLISHER: Ecco (September 27, 2011)
REVIEWER: Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Wikipedia page on Russell Banks
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

And other:

Bibliography:

Nonfiction:

Movies from books:

]]> LADIES’ MAN by Richard Price /2011/ladies-man-by-richard-price/ Thu, 11 Aug 2011 13:46:24 +0000 /?p=19886 Book Quote:

“I was a young man. Strong. Tight. White. And ready to love.”

Book Review:

Review by Guy Savage  AUG 11, 2011)

Crude and hilarious, Ladies’ Man from American author and screenwriter, Richard Price is a week in the life of Kenny Becker, a thirty-year-old college dropout who works as door-to-door salesman selling crappy cheap gadgets. It’s the 1970s, and Kenny lives in New York with his girlfriend, “bank clerk would-be singer” La Donna, a good-looking, marginally talented girl whose big night revolves around a cheesy talent contest at a hole- in-the-wall club called Fantasia. Kenny has a series of failed relationships in his past, and when the book begins, La Donna’s singing lessons, according to Kenny, appear to be placing a strain on the couple. On one hand, Kenny understands he’s supposed to support La Donna, but he also resents the time she is devoting to her singing lessons. Their sex life isn’t as hot and wild as it used to be and with Kenny’s rampant libido largely unsatisfied, he tends to blame the singing lessons for turning La Donna’s head. He sees her night at Fantasia as a potential disaster, but he feels unable to confront his doubts. For one thing, discussing La Donna’s singing is like handling dynamite, and for another, Kenny knows that keeping the peace is the surest way of getting laid:

“I wasn’t going to say dick. I couldn’t. In the beginning we could say anything to each other, but now it was too dangerous; if we started cracking on each other with truths at this point we would inevitably get to the bottom truth, which was that we had no damn right being together anymore, and I for one was scared to death of the alternatives. So I settled for the bullshit low-key rage of two people going through the motions of a relationship, a life; and I couldn’t let her humiliate herself at Fantasia in the name of not rocking the boat even though the boat was capsizing fast, and I would even have the stones to call it being supportive.”

While Kenny, who’s the glib narrator here, argues that he’s trying to protect La Donna from humiliation and a greedy, lying voice coach (a woman he insists on calling Madame Bossanova), it’s clear to the reader that Kenny’s “protectiveness” is rooted in other things. His own insecurities, fears, and possessiveness all play a role in his begrudging, resentful attempts to support La Donna’s Big Night at Fantasia. Kenny is the classic unreliable narrator; we see his world through his eyes, and Kenny, a self-styled ladies’ man, isn’t quite honest about his relationship problems:

“I must have lived with four La Donnas in the last six years and sometimes I thought I was destined to have twice as many in the next six. I seemed to float from one bad, heavy relationship to another, like a trapeze artist swinging from one suspended bar to the next with no net below.”

As Kenny’s week unfolds, the narrative vacillates back and forth between Kenny’s personal and professional life. His mornings begin in a diner with his fellow Bluecastle House salesmen–men who are older than Kenny–older, heavier, and not as handsome, so it’s easy for Kenny to reassure himself that he’s better than them and that the sales job is temporary–just until something better comes along. But Kenny’s at the age when it is becoming harder and harder to kid himself that he’s going somewhere.

Kenny’s relationship with La Donna inevitably implodes, and when he becomes “Kenny Solo,” his desperation grows as he pursues a series of meaningless sexual encounters–each one more degrading than the one before. With a flagging self image, an obsession about his abs, and with his life spiraling out of control, Kenny seeks meaning in his life through sex. While he stalks the neon bars, greasy, sordid whorehouses, and stroke booths of New York, it becomes obvious that Kenny is terrified of being alone, and that his attempts to fill the holes in his life conversely only serve to expose the hollowness of his existence. Author Richard Price establishes one incredibly-staged scene after another–the humiliation of meeting a high school loser who’s now affluent and happy, a late night talk show that draws frantic, lonely losers, the desperation of a singles bar, and the stroke booth where girls hype men into masturbation.

As an unreliable narrator, Kenny is at times the last person to “get it,” and that also means that we aren’t supposed to take his view of life without some skepticism. Kenny may think he’s special, but he’s just as desperate as the guy in the next stroke booth. Here’s Kenny in a singles bar:

“For the next hour I sat at the bar, drinking rum and pretending to watch a basketball game which had orange guys against green guys. People started piling in. I was having a hard time getting rolling so I continued watching the tube. A lot of guys watched the tube, leaning against the bar or the room divider, their drinks tucked under their armpits like footballs. There was no sound on, but we all watched that fucking game with a burning intensity like we were politicos and the screen was flashing election results. I didn’t even know who the hell were playing. My elation was taking a bath. Around me guys swamped girls like pigeons after croutons, blurting out lines so transparent and tacky that even I was offended. No wonder nobody ever got laid. I watched. I listened. I was an observer. A girl nearby, the brittle remains of an almost-melted ice cube floating on top of her half-hour-old drink, listened politely.”

Ladies’ Man is slated to become an American classic. This is a study of one man’s search for meaning and fulfillment through the neon lights of an emotionally barren landscape, and in Kenny’s case, he arrives at his destination with a new uncomfortable knowledge of his weaknesses and his limitations.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-3-5from 10 readers
PUBLISHER: Picador; First Edition edition (June 21, 2011)
REVIEWER: Guy Savage
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Wikipedia page on Richard Price
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

Bibliography:

Movies from books:

]]> THE WINTER GHOSTS by Kate Mosse /2011/the-winter-ghosts-by-kate-mosse/ Sun, 10 Jul 2011 11:44:30 +0000 /?p=19200 Book Quote:

” ‘I am Fabrissa.’ ”

That was it, that was all she said. But it was enough. Already her voice was familiar to me, beloved.”

Book Review:

Review by Lynn Harnett  (JUL 10, 2011)

Mosse gives her beguiling novel an old fashioned gothic framework that suits this eerie story of ghostly love in an insular mountain village of France a decade after WWI. The story opens in 1933 as Frederick Watson visits an antiquarian bookseller in Toulouse. “He walked like a man recently returned to the world. Every step was careful, deliberate. Every step to be relished.” Well-dressed and confident, Watson knows his appearance contrasts sharply with his last visit to Toulouse in 1928 at age 25. “He had been another man then, a tattered man, worn threadbare by grief.”

He hands the bookseller a parchment document to translate, which, the man tells him, dates from medieval days and is written in the local language of the time. The bookseller asks how Watson came to possess the parchment and Watson tells him the story of his strange visit to the Pyrenees in 1928. This first-person narrative forms the bulk of the novel.

For a decade Watson had been consumed by sorrow for his elder brother, George, killed in the war when the younger boy was in his teens. His parents and his friends have lost patience with him. His father is ashamed of him for his lack of backbone; his mother was never much interested in him in the first place. George had been the center of the family. “It was his presence that had made us a family, the glue. Without him we were three strangers with nothing to say.”

The French motor tour, prescribed by his doctor, has taken him into the foothills of the Pyrenees. One tormented night he steps to the edge of a cliff, then steps back. “Was it courage or cowardice that stopped me? Still I cannot say. Even now, I find it hard to tell those imposters one from the other.” The moment marks the beginning of his recovery. He joins a convivial tavern crowd that evening in toasting the new prosperity of their town and begins to understand the human need to move forward.

Still as his journey into the mountains continues, his mood swings; the landscape grows more alien and menacing, the sky more threatening. His aloneness is tangible and then a voice – singing, whispering – sounds plaintively. Watson goes on, but is soon caught in a sudden violent blizzard. His car goes off the road, narrowly avoiding a mortal plunge into a ravine, and he is left to find his way down the mountain to the nearest village.

Which he does, coming to rest at a charming little inn, where he is invited by the innkeeper to a village fete taking place that very night.

And from here the narration becomes deliciously unreliable as Watson makes his solitary way to the fete through narrow and deserted village streets, getting hopelessly lost in the silent night before torchlight and voices guide him to a hall where he’s swept up in a friendly whirl of villagers dressed in medieval clothing, seated at long tables, eating from trenchers.

His own dinner companion is a girl whose beauty is exceeded only by her instinctive understanding. Watson finds himself falling in love with a woman who seems to know him better than he knows himself. But their evening is not destined for a fairytale ending. Not the happy-ever-after kind anyway.

Mosse’s writing is wonderfully spooky as she explores the emotional resonance of grief, loneliness and an unwillingness to let go and move on (why, for instance, are people impatient with this lingering grief?) meld with the redeeming power of love and the repeating cycles of man’s brutality to man, i.e. war and atrocity.

The novel’s form is comfortingly familiar – did Watson hit his head in the accident or fall prey to a fever as the modern villagers believe, or was his emotional state particularly attuned to the unresolved tragedy that remained hidden in the hills?

Poignant and eerie, and steeped in French country atmosphere, this is a novel that should appeal to fans of literary ghost stories.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-3-0from 28 readers
PUBLISHER: Putnam Adult (February 3, 2011)
REVIEWER: Lynn Harnett
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Kate Mosse
EXTRAS: Reading Guide
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

Bibliography:

Languedoc Trilogy:

]]> THE TRAGEDY OF ARTHUR by Arthur Phillips /2011/the-tragedy-of-arthur-by-arthur-phillips/ Fri, 24 Jun 2011 12:39:34 +0000 /?p=18498 Book Quote:

“If you think it’s him, it sounds like him,” Arthur says to his sister; “if you think it’s not, it doesn’t.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (JUN 24, 2011)

The very first thing I did after finishing The Tragedy of Author – Arthur Phillips’s ingenious faux-memoir – was to Google to see what was true and what wasn’t…only to find that much of Phillips’s traceable past has been erased.

Did he really have a gay twin sister named Dana, a scam artist father who spent his adult life in prison, a Czech wife and twin sons of his own? Methinks not. What I do know is that Arthur Phillips shares his birthday with the Bard himself, that he was born in Minnesota, and that he is indeed a writer to be watched very carefully. Because what he’s accomplished in this novel – er, memoir – is sheer genius.

Arthur Phillips – the character – is an unreliable narrator if there ever was one, and points it out in various excerpts. Right from the start when he says, “I have never much liked Shakespeare,” we feel a little off-center. The book is, after all about the ultimate Shakespeare scam: his neer-do-well father, at the end of his life, shares with Arthur a previously unknown play by Shakespeare titled The Tragedy of Arthur and entices him to use his Random House connections to get the play published.

To say his connection with his father is complicated is an understatement. Arthur Phillips, memoirist, reflects, “His life was now beyond my comprehension and much of my sympathy – even if I had been a devoted visitor, a loving son, a concerned participant in his life. I was none of those.” Now he wonders: did his father perform the ultimate con? If so, how did he pull it off? And how do the two Arthurs – Arthur the ancient king portrayed in the “lost” play and Arthur the memoirist – intertwine their fates?

It’s a tricky project and Arthur Phillips – the novelist – is obviously having great fun with it. At one point, he urges readers to, “Go Google the van Meergeen Vermeers…Read James Frey’s memoir now…We blink and look around, rubbing the fairy dust from our eyes, wonder whether we might have dreamt it all. Once you know it isn’t Shakespeare, none of it sounds like Shakespeare. How could it.” But somehow, it does.

The play is reproduced in its entirety in the second part and indeed, it reads like Shakespeare (I read all of his major plays in grad school and have seen many of them performed). It’s absolutely brazen that Arthur Phillips could have mimicked Shakespeare so successfully and with seeming authenticity.

So in the end, the theme comes down to identity. As Phillips the memoirist writes, “So much of Shakespeare is about being at a loss for identity being lost somewhere without the self-defining security of home and security, lost in a shipwreck, confused with a long-lost twin, stripped of familiar power, taken for a thief, taken for the opposite gender, taken for a pauper, believing oneself an orphan.”

And, as Phillips the novelist knows, it’s also a trick for perspective. The play, the novel, the memoir, the scam can equally be said to be “about a man born in Stratford in 1565 – maybe on April 22 or 24, by the way — or about an apocryphal boy king in Dark Ages England or about my father or his idea of me or my grandfather or Dana in armor or or or.” Just as Shakespeare may or may not have written his plays – according to some anti-Bards – so might this new one be a fakery, written by Arthur’s fictional father. There is layer steeped upon layer steeped upon layer in this book. It’s audacious and it’s brilliant. Arthur Phillips convincingly shows us just how easy it is to reinvent a play, a history, or ourselves with just a few sweeps of a pen.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 43 readers
PUBLISHER: Random House; First Edition edition (April 19, 2011)
REVIEWER: Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Arthur Phillips
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:The Song is You

Another book had us fooled:

Incident at Twenty-Mile by Trevanian

Bibliography:

]]> DECEPTIONS by Rebecca Frayn /2011/deceptions-by-rebecca-frayn/ Fri, 20 May 2011 12:59:54 +0000 /?p=18107 Book Quote:

“But you have to trust me when I say that at heart Dan’s a good kid. Honestly. If he were here now, you would see for yourself. He just needs a firm hand at times. Like a lot of boys his age. It’s just a phase. That’s all. Just a phase.”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowksy (MAY 20, 2011)

Julian Poulter, the first-person narrator of Rebecca Frayn’s Deceptions, is a somewhat priggish individual who says things like, “I’ve always believed one must strive to put painful episodes behind one with the minimum of fuss and bother.” He is a master of denial who, in flashback, tells how he and Annie Wray, a teacher, tried to forge a permanent relationship when he moved in with her and her two children by her late husband. Annie is flightier and far more spontaneous than Julian; each provides a quality that the other lacks.

Annie’s daughter, Rachel, is eight; she is a sweet little girl who gives her mother little cause to worry. On the other hand, twelve-year-old Dan has become surly and uncommunicative. He has begun dressing and talking like some of his less wholesome schoolmates in Fishers Comprehensive. Dan’s grades have dropped, and he has made it clear that he resents Julian, whom he views as an interloper. Not long after Julian and Annie announce their intention to marry, Dan leaves and does not return.

This is a heartbreaking tale of a family ripped apart by tragedy. Julian, who adores Annie, tries to be patient with her mood swings. Her outlook fluctuates from optimism to despair; unsurprisingly, she is guilt ridden and finding her child becomes an obsession. To some extent, Rachel and Julian are shunted aside while the drama unfolds. The author captures the agony of waiting by the telephone, spotting kids who look like Dan but are not, and repeating the same information to the police so many times that the situation becomes surreal. This is every parent’s “waking nightmare,” and Frayn explores the ripple effect that this calamity has on the immediate family and the community as a whole.

The title refers to the ways in which we delude ourselves and others: Does Annie really love Julian or is she subconsciously exploiting him? Is Julian psychologically sound or is he so repressed that genuine emotions leave him helpless? Can Annie learn to live with the possibility that Dan may be gone forever? When a shocking development gives Annie hope that her troubles may be behind her, Julian has his doubts.

Since we suspect Julian’s perspective may be somewhat distorted, we have no choice but to draw our own conclusions. Frayn makes good use of dialogue, pregnant pauses, and subtle clues to seize and hold our attention. We suspect that what seems obvious may not even be true, and that one person’s reality can be another’s fantasy. Deceptions is distressing, touching, and painful; it shows how dangerous it is to love someone too much; when we open our hearts, we become vulnerable. Sometimes, self-deception is the only tool that allows us to face another day without going mad.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 2 readers
PUBLISHER: Washington Square Press; Original edition (May 3, 2011)
REVIEWER: Eleanor Bukowsky
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Rebecca Frayn
EXTRAS: Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

We Need To Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver

The Disapparation of James by Anne Ursu

Bibliography:

]]> FAITH by Jennifer Haigh /2011/faith-by-jennifer-haigh/ Tue, 10 May 2011 13:16:40 +0000 /?p=17810 Book Quote:

“Art’s story is, to me, the story of my own family, with all its darts and dodges and mysterious omissions: the open secrets long unacknowledged, the dark relics never unearthed.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (MAY 10, 2011)

Jennifer Haigh exerts a sublime spin on the unreliable narrator in this probing, poignant saga of an Irish-American family hailing from Boston’s South End. Sheila McGann, the central narrator, left Boston and her Catholic faith years ago while her family stayed in “Southie.” The cardinal premise is the question of whether her half-brother, Art, a once esteemed and trusted but now disgraced and defrocked parish priest, is really guilty of the alleged sexual abuse of a child. This is 2002, when the Archdiocese of Boston is in the whir of sexual scandal—the exposure of crimes of pedophilia.

The story is told (as verity is sought) through Sheila as first-person witness to her family history. She serves as a sieve or net and sometimes a buoy or beacon and even a trespass or misstep as she harnesses the voices of her family and other witnesses. With her own voice, she intimately addresses the reader. Her destination is the hopeful arrival at truth and exoneration.

Sheila, as narrator, is like the conscientious driver who reliably navigates known roads, and aims to steer well through dim or dark patches and thick blankets of fog. But the cursory compass of her mother’s stoicism, Art’s dubious determinism, and (her brother) Mike’s aggressive loss of faith in Art keep Sheila and the reader in the alternating shadows of fact and fallacy. We’re on a guided (and sometimes inadvertently misguided) tour of one family’s hell and well of secrets, lies, and fault lines. We move in time with Sheila to parse gospel from myth.

What we do know is that Sheila’s mother had two husbands. The first man fled when Art was a baby, and the Catholic Church subsequently annulled the marriage. The second one, Ted, is the alcoholic father of Sheila and Mike, a man whose liver is now the size of a moving van and whose brain is the size of a pea. He lives in the basement of the house with his baseball on television and fragmented memories. Once a tyrant, he is now a pussycat.

Sheila’s mother, still attractive in her sixties, is the repository of guilt, denial, and appearances. Her preference for Art above her other two children is sinfully transparent and her store of secrets and silence is woefully debilitating. Mike lives ten minutes away with his urbane Lutheran wife, Abby, who detests all things Catholic. Their sons, much to Abby’s opposition, receive a Catholic education. Their marriage becomes strained after Art’s disgrace from the parish, and Mike vows to find out the truth as Abby’s hatred and mistrust of the Catholic Church is vindicated and exacerbated by the scandal. Furthermore, Sheila’s attempt to communicate with Art is thwarted by his evasive passivity.

The story’s progression from shadow to light is finessed by Haigh’s ability to organically and gradually tease out the repressed and unknown facts and annex it to Sheila’s existing information and beliefs. Nuggets of truth are mined from artifact with shattering grace, and the weight of the past and the sorrow of the present intersect with astonishing clarity. The author took a potentially explosive and sensationalistic premise and turned it into a predominantly quiet, tenacious story of doubt, faith, and redemption.

The novel is equally appealing to the secular or orthodox, and Haigh’s natural and luminous prose shimmers on every page. There’s no preaching or melodrama glossing the story or lurid and commercial exploitation lacing the events. It is a deliberating but nuanced treatment of a subject too often made smarmy and shrill by the media. The focus is the substance of family and the binding and severed ties that tangle the heart.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-5from 129 readers
PUBLISHER: Harper (May 10, 2011)
REVIEWER: Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Jennifer Haigh
EXTRAS: Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

Bibliography:

]]> THE PAPERBARK SHOE by Goldie Goldbloom /2011/the-paperbark-shoe-by-goldie-goldbloom/ Fri, 22 Apr 2011 13:05:04 +0000 /?p=17496 Book Quote:

“There are things that I learned to do after coming to Wyalkatchem… how to hang a blanket in the boughs of a gum tree and rock a baby to sleep, how to sit quietly at night with a child in my lap, how to feel for a fever, how to boil willow for its cooling sap, how to paint a throat with gentian violet and listen for the smallest breath, how to make a coffin, how to line it with pieces of cotton, how to dress a dead child, how to lower a coffin into the ground, how to put one foot in front of the other and keep on doing it every day.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (APR 22, 2011)

It’s a tough world that’s inhabited by Gin Boyle Toad – an albino, a classical pianist, an unloved woman whose life has been reduced to freak show status with the indelicate stares, the gossip, the pointing. Although she was raised in Perth’s wealthy environs and showed early and sustained musical talent, she is abused and ultimately institutionalized by her cruel and loathsome stepfather.

Her unlikely rescuer is Agrippas Toad, a dwarfish and crudely mannered farmer who happens to hear her play piano and immediately marries her. By doing so, he attempts to stave off the rumors about behavior that is deemed aberrant in his small-minded farm community. It is the “strangeness” of these two that binds them together. Gin Boyle reflects, “It wasn’t happiness. It wasn’t love. But it had been tolerable, so long as there was nothing else.”

Into these unfulfilled lives come two Italian prisoners of war – Antonio and John – part of a wave of 18,000 Italian prisoners of war who were sent to work on isolated Australian farms between 1941 and 1947. The very pregnant and unloved Gin forms a dangerous affinity for Antonio, a shoemaker by trade, who gives her the attention and compassion that is missing from her marriage. In the meantime, Toad is more intrigued by John, for reasons that eventually become evident.

Gin Boyle – aching from the death of her oldest daughter, Joan, also an albino…scarred from years of feeling like a freak…embarrassed that her life has become circumvented in an ugly small town with a small husband who has an obsession with lady’s corsets…feels the stirring of love under Antonio’s appreciative gazes and through his words. But is it real and can it last?

There are some very real strengths in Goldie Goldbloom’s debut book. The prose often soars to lyricism and the description of the landscape is positively breathtaking. In fact, the harsh and unforgiving Australian outback becomes a character in its own right, and the occasional foray of violence – the hunting of the rabbits, the capricious weather, the lopping off of sheep’s tails – is a fine metaphor for the wartime world. In addition, the book presents some meaningful and compelling themes: what “home” really means, the subtle violence of displacement, and how so many of us are prisoners, either literally or metaphorically, either behind bars or within our own skin.

Is it a perfect book? Well, no. Goldie Goldbloom sometimes doesn’t trust her reader quite enough and drums home certain messages: “You are a stone fortress, not a person. When you opened your gates, it was not to surrender to me, but to capture me.” Or, in response to why Gin didn’t lock up her Italian captives, “They’re men. Not animals.” The build-up relating to Joan ends up being undeveloped and here and there, there’s some melodrama.

But even with those fault lines, this is still an imaginative and stunningly original debut, with characters that will remain seared into your memory. Her mesmerizing tale demands to be read and to be appreciated. The book was originally called “Toad’s Museum of Freaks and Wonders” and has been retitled for its U.S. publication.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 30 readers
PUBLISHER: Picador; First Edition edition (March 29, 2011)
REVIEWER: Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Goldie Goldbloom
EXTRAS: Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:

Bibliography:

]]>