#21: Her Fearful Symmetry, Audrey Niffenegger

Eh, another book I didn't love. The Time Traveler's Wife is one of my top 5 favorite books ever, so I really wanted to fall in love with this one too. But it just didn't grab me. Niffenegger is a truly talented writer, and so full of original ideas, but I didn't feel like Her Fearful Symmetry came together convincingly. (And according to Entertainment Weekly, she received a $5 million advance for this book. $5 million, yowza!)

First off, I'm generally not into twin books. With the exception of Sweet Valley High, it seems like twins are always portrayed in literature as freaks...like in The 13th Tale, Flowers in the Attic, and even, if I remember correctly, The Shining. I'm not a twin so it's not a personal thing, but I dislike the use over and over again of twins as strange little beings with co-dependent love/hate relationships. (Clearly that last sentence doesn't apply to The Shining - but those little freaky kid ghosts that the boy sees are twins, right?)

With that off my chest...Her Fearful Symmetry is about two sets of twins, Elspeth and Edie, and Edie's daughters, Julia and Valentina. When Elspeth dies of cancer, she leaves her apartment - across from Highgate Cemetery in London - and a good wad of cash to the younger, American twins, with the stipulation that they live in the flat for a year before they can sell it. Their parents are also not allowed to enter the apartment. Julia and Valentina are both inseperable but also fighting for their own identities, which ends up creating a lot of conflict. Valentina, the meeker twin, ends up getting involved with Robert, who lives downstairs and was Elspeth's longtime companion. Which Elspeth doesn't like - she's come back as a ghost who's trapped in the apartment with the girls. And off it goes...

The thing is, while the story is interesting in its retelling, I felt as though the events in Her Fearful Symmetry happened at a distance, like we were held apart from it. You saw the characters but you didn’t know really them. And while I think it's a valid style choice, and I'm guessing one made to make the plot turns a surprise, I didn't connect with Julia or Valentina or any of the rest of them.

Maybe it was a style choice, but I felt that Niffenegger broke an essential style rule, that of "show, don't tell." I think we were often told about the characters' personality traits, instead of seeing them on display – and so it was not always believable. Elspeth is probably the best example: For 300 pages, she’s a friendly ghost figure who never expresses any sort of meanness. Then one day, Robert says she’s manipulative: “Elspeth isn’t nice. Even when she was alive she wasn’t very – she was witty and beautiful and fantastically original in – certain ways, but now that she’s dead she seems to have lost some essential quality – compassion, or empathy, some human thing – I don’t think you should trust her, Valentina.” (p.303) I read that passage and I was like, what? As it turns out, Elspeth is manipulative but I don’t think one sentence here and there can create a believable shift when the previous 300 pages have shown otherwise. The same thing happens with Valentina – she's the Mouse throughout the book and then all of a sudden she does something so ridiculously absurd and bold. I just don’t think her characterization backed it up.

At the end, I found Her Fearful Symmetry to be kinda vague. Like, what happened with Julia and Martin on that last night? There’s an implication, but… And who was Elspeth, really? Was she devious and she allowed the mist to disperse – or was she really not able to fix it? The text is unclear and I found that to be annoying. Again, it's a style choice, but I've never liked having to guess at the unanswered questions.

Still, Niffenegger is so good at evoking beauty in the midst of pain, which I think is the true strength of The Time Traveler's Wife. My favorite passage in this book, Her Fearful Symmetry, comes on page 50: “As each night passed he found it more difficult to evoke Marijke precisely. He panicked and pinned up dozens of photographs of her all over the flat. Somehow this only made things worse. His actual memories began to be replaced by the images; his wife, a whole human being, was turning into a collection of dyes on small white rectangles of paper. Even the photographs were not as intensely colourful as they had once been, he could see that. Washing them didn’t help. Marijke was bleaching out of his memory. The harder he tried to keep her the faster she seemed to vanish.”

I also find her to be so ridiculously creative. In both books, she's come up with original plots, which I think is a hard feat these days. Probably my favorite scene in Her Fearful Symmetry is Martin's dream about sitting on the Tube and realizing the women across from him are squirrels. How awesome is that?

#20: Julie and Julia, Julie Powell

Julie and Julia is another book that I liked fine enough, but didn't love. I suppose I feel sort of ambivalent about it, as I don't care to spend much time blogging about it. The writing is good - the kind of good where you don't notice the writing - but I just never got sucked into the story. (As always, I was curious to see what Amazon reviewers thought - more people hated it than loved it, and wow, the haters really hated it.)

Perhaps it was partly because I don't cook and I knew almost nothing about Julia Child. (The only thing I knew, actually, besides the fact that she was a cook, was that she served in the OSS. I didn't know the name of her famous cookbook, which I'm sure Julie Powell would find ridiculous. And actually, I realized that when I "think" of Julia Child, I somehow see her as Dr. Ruth. Go figure.) So I wasn't locked into the concept. On top of that, I'm a notoriously picky eater so I couldn't identify with cooking hardships, like boiling lobsters alive. (Hell, I don't think I'd touch a single recipe in that book.) So, in short, loving Julie and Julia for the cooking was out.

But really, it all, er, boils down to this: I just didn't connect with Powell. (Which is sort of funny because we have a lot in common, like our home state and alma mater and rabid affection for Civilization.) We clearly don't have the same sense of humor, so I didn't find most of the jokes funny. But more than anything, I felt like Powell skipped the hard stuff. The narrative was pretty jumpy and I often felt that she ended scenarios before discussing the fall-out or the resulting emotions. As a result, I had a hard time feeling her situation and empathizing with her, which I think is essential in a memoir like this. More than once, I was surprised by an emotional revelation - like when she and her husband were going through a rough patch - because she would mention it for a sentence or two and then not delve into it again for another 50 pages.

There are two other, similar books that I sprang to mind as I read Julie and Julia: A.J. Jacobs' The Know-It-All and Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love - and they're both, hilariously, mentioned in some form in the credits. I have to say, I far preferred these other two memoirs. The Know-It-All was just awesomely funny (and, for those who don't know, about a guy's quest to read the encyclopedia from A to Z). But to the earlier point, with Eat, Pray, Love, I totally respected that Gilbert put all her emotions - good, bad, and ugly - out there on the table. She was neurotic, yes, but I totally understood what she was doing and why. But as much as I loved that book, there are legions of smart women who hated it, for that very same reason - so in closing, I'll just say, perhaps Julie and Julia is for them?

Next up: Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger. With not so many weeks until the New Year, I am trying to read quick in order to reach the blessed 30!