#5: Russian Winter, Daphne Kalotay

I read Russian Winter in January, just as Natalie Portman won the Golden Globe for her performance in Black Swan; for awhile there, I felt surrounded by mentally unstable ballerinas with starring roles in Swan Lake. The two stories dovetailed quite nicely and I enjoyed a month filled with visions of tutus and sugar plums dancing in my head.

Like Possession and the Lauren Willeg novels, Russian Winter features lonely modern-day scholars try to figure out mysterious historical happenings who in doing so heal their own psychological wounds. In this one, professor and adoptee Grigori Solodin is trying to figure out who his parents are; before the novel opens, he has contacted the now-elderly prima ballerina Nina Revskaya, and although we don't know exactly why, she suddenly decides to auction off all of her jewelry. This jumpstarts Russian Winter's plot and brings in Drew Brooks, a recently divorced young woman who works at the auction house and is trying to unearth Nina Revskaya's biography, in order to firm up the auction catalogue. The novel moves back and forth between the present day, when Drew and Grigori start working together, to Nina's memories in Moscow before she defected. Interestingly, the present-day action is written in past tense, while Nina's memories happen in present tense, flipping perspective on "reality" and importance.

At first, I couldn't get into it. Grigori's only clue to his birth parents is a purse that contains some photos, letters, and an amber pendant. He's sure that the letters were written by Nina's husband, Viktor Elsin, and Nina has launched the auction after hearing from him - so it seemed pretty obvious, despite the book's mystery, that they are his biological parents. But then I realized that was way too easy and figured out who his parents really were - and suprisingly that got me into Russian Winter, because I knew it was going to take some serious drama to make that happen and I was looking forward to the where and the when. And then the end came and I found out I was totally wrong - the real answer was totally out of left field (but a believable left field) and I was really impressed by the actual ending, the believable surprise. It seems like a difficult feat to pull off but Kalotay managed it well.

Russian Winter also reminded me, interestingly, of Atonement and The Joy Luck Club, with the introduction of the subtle idea that the telling of stories can heal wounds, and the release of depressing/scary/embarrassing family stories (ie the truth) can free you from emotional burden. As a writer, I really connect with that message - it seems like one of literature's main purposes and the result is beautiful and powerful when done well.

At the end of the novel, Nina says, "'Who else, after I die, will even remember these people? They were real people.' It sounded silly to say it that way, not what she meant at all. What she meant was that it seemed a crime that their thoughts, their lives -- the very fact of their lives, the truth of their lives -- were lost along with them. No one to preserve the truth of who they were. Who they had been." (p. 427)

An Aside: Great Gatsby video game

Yes, there's a Great Gatsby video game that you can play on the Internet! In this supposedly original Nintendo game (Mediabistro doubts the "I found it at a yard sale" origin story), you take on the persona of Nick Carraway navigating his way through the world. The game starts out at one of Gatsby's parties, where Nick's goal is to dodge waiters (or take them out with his flying hat weapon) in an attempt to locate Gatsby.

A random Level Two, the Valley of Ashes, takes place on top of a train. I'm not quite sure what the ultimate point of The Great Gatsby game is - I couldn't get past the laser-shooting T.J. Eckleburg eyes to find out - but the game is quietly addicting, despite the annoying soundtrack.

Clearly I'm not the only one who feels this way. The game has garnered 126, 000 Facebook likes and 5,000+ tweets!

#4: The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan

For the record, I finished Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club for the second time at the end of January. I assigned it to my students because it oddly treads some similar ground as The Odyssey and King Arthur, but from a female/minority perspective. I really do love this novel but after three weeks of discussing it, a quiz examining it, and an exam reviewing it, I just can't be bothered to blog about it. I hope you understand.

#3: The Red Queen, Philippa Gregory

The Red Queen is book two of the Cousins' War series; I read the first book, the aptly titled The White Queen, at the end of December 2009. The first two books portray more or less the same time period, but from opposite sides, during England's War of the Roses in the 1400s. The narrators of both books are the scheming wives of powerful men: The White Queen featured Elizabeth Woodville who married the Yorkist King Edward IV whereas The Red Queen centers on Margaret Beaufort, heir to the House of Lancaster. They're both desperately trying to put their own heirs on the throne (although god knows why, they're technically all part of one family...hooray for incest!).

About halfway through both Queen books, the stories merge together; I assumed book three would focus on the ultimate outcome (the two rivals becoming grandmothers to the same future king) but Philippa Gregory's website says that the next book, The Rivers Woman out fall 2011, will focus on Elizabeth's mother, Jacquetta, a rumored witch. But I digress...

I didn't enjoy this book as much as the first, possibly because Margaret Beaufort might be one of the most annoying characters working in fiction today. As a child, she believes that she has divine visions of Joan of Arc and believes she is just as chosen, making for a lot of sanctimonious selfishness. It is slightly amusing when she utters clueless things like, "I care nothing for his good looks as I am devoid of vanity and lust, but the rightness of being his wife and becoming Queen of England haunts me like a lost love" (p. 212). But then, passage after passage, I was reminded of how much I hate people like this...because mon dieu, if you gotta let everyone know just how devout you are, you're in it for the wrong reasons.

Besides drinking the Jesus juice, Margaret harbors some serious jealous toward Elizabeth Woodville for marrying Edward IV, a mate that would have made Margaret queen. And Margaret deserved to be queen, dontcha know? "The plans were formed by a woman who thought herself the mother of a king, who could not be satisfied to be an ordinary woman," Margaret says on page 301, speaking of Elizabeth though she easily could be describing herself. "The fault of the enterprise lay in the vanity of a woman who would be queen, and who would overturn the peace of the country for her own selfish desire." She says this, of course, after she's failed to overthrow King Richard III when trying to put her own kid on the throne.

So after all this, you expect (nay, pray!) she'll get the comeuppance she so rightly deserves. The book ends before the saga concludes but historically, you know it's not going to happen. Her kid is Henry Tudor, i.e. Henry VII. She gets exactly what she wants and becomes a very powerful figure at court, far more powerful than her rival's daughter, Elizabeth of York, who ends up bearing her a grandchild. Margaret deserves a swift kick in the ass but alas, it never arrives. And that ends up being a real shame after putting up with this woman for 400 pages.

An Aside: Casting The Hunger Games

From what I've seen on the interwebs, there's a lot of speculation surrounding The Hunger Games casting but no actual news to report. (In December, the L.A. Times quoted producer Nina Jacobsen as saying they have no front-runners since they're still looking over the millions of young actors no doubt salivating for the star-making roles. That last part, of course, is mine; she just said they were still looking for someone who could capture Katniss' complexity.)

So, I offer a suggestion. Not for Katniss, but for the role of Panem president Coriolanus Snow. As I was reading Mockingjay, a book which prominently features President Snow and his white hair, a vision hit me. He should be played by this man:

Yes, Karl Lagerfeld. That is all.

#2: Mockingjay, Suzanne Collins

Thank god, Mockingjay took the plot in a new direction. Don't get me wrong, I quite enjoyed The Hunger Games - just not twice. But this last installment had serious "what's going to happen" momentum and I consumed Mockingjay in about 24 hours.

In the third and final book, the rebellion has taken center stage. Mockingjay starts with Katniss walking around the ashes of her home, District 12, which was blown to bits by the government forces after she was pulled out of the Quarter Quell arena in a massive plot by the rebels of District 13 - where she now lives with her mother, sister, and remaining survivors. Katniss is very conflicted about taking over the role of the Mockingjay, the symbolic heart of the revolution, because it will result in death and she hasn't resolved her guilt about causing death to her fellow tributes to secure her own life. The book isn't terribly complicated or filled with any surprises but it's remarkable for this - the emotional wounding of Katnisss Everdeen.

The main characters in the other two wildly popular teen series, Harry Potter and Twilight, on the other hand exhibit an utter lack of growth, which is what I came to hate about the books. I mean, the characters go through all kinds of crazy shit but at the end, they emerge unscathed and ridiculously cheerful like they've spent their respective series sunbathing on Bora Bora. How does that work? (Conversely, the emotional fallout is what I respect in works like The Lord of the Rings, Atonement, and even The Odyssey. Being good, or trying to be good, is a lot harder than being bad. If heroism was easy, everyone would be heroic. The point of these books is, the hero suffers and keeps going, despite personal consequence...making him/her a hero. Sheesh.)

Without giving away the plot, I'll just say that unlike Bella Swan, Katniss Everdeen doesn't get everything she wants wrapped up in a neat little bow at the end. She succeeds and completes her heroic journey - which I think was obvious from the outset and not actually giving anything away - but not without loss and change. And that journey - both emotional and physical - was what made for an incredible series.

An Aside: Mystery and Maxfield Parrish's Daybreak

As I mentioned in my last post, there are 22 art prints strewn throughout Steve Martin's most recent novel, An Object of Beauty. I loved these unexpected delights and yet....I found them a little confusing. I could never figure out if the print was the actual piece mentioned in the text or just a work by that particular artist meant to enhance the reading experience. (Or perhaps I am just way over-thinking this?)

The one that really stumped me though was the appearance of Maxfield Parrish's Daybreak, as the Parrish print in the text is the novel's smoking gun. This is what the gorgeous print looks like:

But then the text describes the scene differently: Lacey points to the painting and tells the narrator Daniel that her grandmother was a woman named Kitty Owen, who "was eighteen when she took off all her clothes for him and posed." Which then means that the "grandmother" has to be the figure standing up, since the figure lying down is clothed. She goes on to say that the now 92-year-old no longer has the red hair and the narrator Daniel writes, "I looked at the slender, pale girl on the cover of the book, who looked like a faun standing over an idyllic pool trimmed in iridescent tiles." From all that, I deduced that the unnamed painting in the book was just made-up since the standing figure isn't pale with red hair or standing over a pool or even "arching up, and facing the twilight" as the chapter ends with. And fine, this is a work of fiction; I accept this. But, but...then I found out Kitty Owen was a real woman who posed for Maxfield Parrish. So shouldn't it be a description of the painting featured in the book? I am confused.

And apparently, I am the only person confused. I tried googling this, but the only thing that popped up was middling reviews for this book (though interestingly, an Object of Beauty has 44 five-star reviews on Amazon, compared to a combined 30 one- and two-star reviews.) So, yup, perhaps I am way over-thinking this...though if anyone has a thought, I'm all ears.

#1: An Object of Beauty, Steve Martin

I feel conflicted about An Object of Beauty. I absolutely adore Steve Martin (and should I ever win an Oscar, I fantasize that he will be the one to hand it over) and found this novel to be a quick read on a flight home from Europe. But I didn't actually like it - I kept waiting for the action to start but it never really did...and then it ended with a dull deus en machina event. As usual, I will do a little spoiling, but only a very little bit.

An Object of Beauty tells the sordid tale of a young woman named Lacey Yeager who is determined to take Manhattan by storm, by any means possible. So it's all sex and schemes and it seems to work even though she's kinda despicable. The telling of all this comes by an old friend, narrator Daniel Franks, who documents her high-powered career in the art world in order to try to figure out her allure and her tricks. As he says in the first line, "I am tired, so very tired of thinking about Lacey Yeager, yet I worry that unless I write her story down, I will be unable to ever write about anything else." Writing this now, I sort of see a parallel with Nick Carraway and The Great Gastsby - it's another book where a passive narrator is trying to figure out why selfish people are doing bad things and why, for a time, he participates. And yet, An Object of Beauty is no Great Gatsby.

I think the main reason (and the biggest problem with the book) was that the pivotal moment - when Lacey acquires a large sum of money through devious means - comes very quietly. So quietly, in fact, that only in retrospect did I see that it was the do-or-die moment for Lacey, the moment that the entire novel hinged on. It was also the turning point for the narrator. I guess the incident was to remain as a question stuck in my mind, but it was so undramatic that I forgot about it. Which is the problem with having an emotionally distant narrator - he didn't seem to care that much about it, so why would I?

The most interesting thing about An Object of Beauty was the 22 color art prints scattered throughout the book. I was shocked when the first one appeared on page 14 (though perhaps I should have just read the book jacket more carefully). Oh, and I learned that Steve Martin and I have wildly different versions of what constitutes "sex." His descriptions and the use of the word sex didn't seem to match up in the conventional definition - and I think that might actually, randomly be my biggest takeaway. So take from that what you will.