People of the Book: Good but sorta passionless (#29)

Geraldine Brooks' People of the Book has a lot of promise: Rare book expert Hanna Heath travels Sarajevo in 1996 to inspect and stabilize the refound Sarajavo Haggadah, an illuminated Jewish codex that miraculously survives the ravages of time. The book actually exists and from what I remember of the plot, Brooks pretty closely follows the real Haggadah's history as is known but inserts fictional characters and develops plausible vignettes around them. I found People of the Book to be interesting, certainly, but I wasn't captivated by it - and what I most want from my books is to be swept up. Partially I think I just don't connect with Brooks' writing style as I had the same reaction to Year of Wonders, a novel about a plague that wrecks havoc on a small English town.

As the title implies, People of the Book is about the people whose (imagined) lives were touched by the Haggadah. Hanna is only the last of them and her story - along with her unresolved love issues, both with her domineering mother and a librarian she meets - bookends the novel. Which is fine and dandy - except that I found Hanna to be an incredibly frustrating character. She's good at her job but a wallflower in all other aspects of her life and yet again, I had a difficult time empathizing. She eventually gets it together and owns her identity but hot damn if it didn't take the entire book. (I know, I know, it's character arc but does she have to start out so passive?)

As Hanna does her inspection on the Haggadah, she finds tiny items in the book - a moth wing, a white hair, a wine stain - which then launch the vignettes, as we see how each of these items made its way there. The individual stories were interesting but also disconnecting  because Hanna herself never and cannot discover such historical detail - and I found it strange that the reader takes a journey that the protagonist has no clue about. As much as I disliked Hanna, it was still her story and I thought it an odd choice to effectively dump the protagonist in sections along the way. (I also thought it was weird that the stories went backwards in time - I get it intellectually but on paper it felt like a dismantling rather than a building up to something.) It was again emotionally separating and so while I liked the book, I never found that I cared all that much. You knew from the outset that this precious book was safe (or ostensibly anyway - there ends up being a last-minute mystery) so the connection has to be through Hanna...and for me, it just wasn't there.

Photos of the Haggadah's gorgeous illuminations, including the one I used at the top, can be found here: http://www.haggadah.ba/?x=2&y=1#. It now lives in Sarajevo's National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The Help: Surprising myself, I liked it (#28)

My mother had tried to pawn The Help off on me some time ago but I demurred - it seemed a little too Oprah-y for me and you know how I hate those Oprah selections. Or maybe it was the cover - what are those little birds doing there and what do they have to do with this novel? But then all the movie hype started and I for whatever reason, I decided to pick up this book - and then, surprise upon surprise, I actually liked it.

The Help is the story of the relationships between and among a group of white women and their black housekeepers in Jackson, Miss., in the 1960s. All of the white ladies are married and doing the society thing except for Skeeter, an aspiring writer who wants a different kind of life - and in searching for it, ends up convincing housekeepers Aibileen and Minny (and eventually others) to anonymously tell her their on-the-job anecdotes, both good and bad. Their project eventually becomes a book, riling many a temper in town, especially as people begin to suspect who is who. Overall, I thought it was a very sweet book - there's a lot of affection between the "good" characters which I thought was The Help's biggest strength.

There are a lot of people who love The Help, if 3,765 five-star Amazon reviews are anything to go by. But when the movie came out, for the first time I started hearing negative things about it as well. The main criticism seems to center on the fact that the protagonist is one of the white women and the book's subliminal suggestion that Aibileen and the other maids couldn't have accomplished anything without her. As Martha Southgate wrote in an Entertainment Weekly column, "Minny and Aibileen are heroines, but they didn't need Skeeter to guide them to the light. They fought their way out of the darkness on their own — and they brought the nation with them."

I can totally see Southgate's point though it doesn't dampen my enthusiam for the book. And that's because, from a literary standpoint, Skeeter is the protagonist. (You can argue that the protagonist should have been Aibileen but then maybe that's not Kathryn Stockett's book to write.) In this book, which is Stockett's fictionalized memoir-ish, Skeeter is the protagonist and the book doesn't work if the protagonist is not the hero. The Help is Skeeter's journey as she returns home from college and realizes she no longer fits in to her world, and thus has to find a new world for herself. The civil rights stuff, in the novel, is ultimately nothing but background and context for that journey.

But of course, the world is not one big English class and I'm not sure how much literary form matters here. If it was my personal history, I might be pretty pissed too. (Interestingly, a real woman named Ablene Cooper - who happens to be Stockett's brother's housekeeper - alledged that Stockett unlawfully used her name and likeness in the book, though the lawsuit was eventually thrown out because it exceeded the statute of limitations.) All in all, I think it's best to read The Help with the proverbial grain of salt: Enjoy it while keeping the criticism in mind.

Sisterhood Everlasting: Break Out the Kleenex (#27)

I was pleasantly surprised by Ann Brashares' Sisterhood Everlasting, the adult follow-up to her immensely popular series that started with the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. I assumed it would the shallowness of Sweet Valley Confidential but she really took this novel to a dark place which the publisher's write-up doesn't even begin to hint at. I'm not ashamed to say I spent most of this reading experience with a Kleenex wadded up in my hand.

The four Sisterhood books are about four girls - Lena, Carmen, Bridget, and Tibby - who have been best friends from birth. One summer in their teenage years, they discover a pair of jeans that fit them all, despite their wildly varying body types - and they decide these pants must be magic. (How could they not be, really?) But as they face their own individual challenges, like death, divorcing parents, and heartbreak, that summer and beyond, they start to drift apart - but they send the pants back and forth between them and it helps keep them linked together. In the last book, as in the second movie, the pants sink to somewhere at the bottom of the Aegean, alas, and they realize that they don't really need them, their friendship is stronger than a piece of fabric, etc.

Sisterhood Everlasting fast-forwards to about 10 years later, when the girls are in their 20s. At first, it's not all that surprising what they're doing: Carmen is a successful actress but due to her daddy issues is engaged to a self-absorbed jerk; Lena is an emotionally crippled art teacher in Rhode Island who's still afraid to take a risk on life; and Bridget is still a free spirit who, despite settling down with Eric in California, feels caged in such a domestic lifestyle. Only Tibby is the mystery - she moved to Australia with Brian but the girls have barely heard from her, effectively breaking their sisterhood. Then one day, Tibby sends them each a letter with a plane ticket to Greece, for a reunion similar to the one in book 4. But then the three girls arrive and Tibby isn't there...and that's all I say about the plot. Except get out the box of tissues. You'll definitely need the tissues.

The Rembrandt Affair: Like Shoving Politics Down Your Throat (#26)

In exciting news, this was my first e-book! Thank you kindly local library!

In less-exciting news, I wasn't terribly keen on Daniel Silva's The Rembrandt Affair and doubt that I will ever read another book by him again. Granted, thrillers aren't my usual genre but I picked this one up when I saw the plot hinged on a favorite subject of mine, looted art (and the controversies that often lie behind it). But in the end, I felt like this was just a poorly disguised politics masquerading as fiction - and if I wanted to read a one-sided view of the Middle East crisis, I would have picked up something that said it on the cover. Just say what it is, you know (ahem, Skinny Bitch)?

Apparently the hero of previous Silva thrillers, Gabriel Allon is a now-retired Israeli spy and assassin who is happily living in Cornwall, resting after whatever awful thing happened in the last book (something with Russian arms dealers, I gathered). However, as these things happen, he gets sucked into a new case when a sort-of former rival  is murdered, and Allon's friend, art dealer Julian Isherwood, confesses he's on the hook for $45 million after not insuring the Rembrandt painting that the murderer stole. So Allon goes looking for the painting, finding a Dutch Holocaust survivor whose father owned the painting, which leads him to the son of an SS officer in Argentina, which leads him to a grand conspiracy puppeteered by a noted humanitarian-financier in Switzerland.

None of it was very suspenseful, partially because Silva has this really weird narrative technique of reassuring the reader that everything will be fine before a big event. “She would never be told, however, they were the former and present chiefs of the Israeli secret intelligence service” (322) is one tiny example but in context, I knew at the outset that the "she" in question would survive her task and live to be debriefed...which seems to take away the thrilling aspect of the thriller. Silva used this calm, detached voice multiple times so I never questioned that everything would work out just fine. Come to think of it, I don't there were any casualties in this book, aside from the initial victim.

But mostly, this just felt like a PR tract about Israel, a very simplistic rendering of who the good guys are and who the bad guys are. I think the Author's Note at the back supports this interpretation; Silva harrangues the entire nations of Germany and Switzerland in this almost sarcastic voice. And I'm sorry, but it’s just not that easy - and frankly, I'm getting a little tired of these really simplistic renderings of a very complex issue that have infiltrated the general understanding. At his point in time, there are no clear-cut heroes or villians in the Middle East conflict; both sides have done some awful things. Whatever else you believe, this is a fact. I think it's fine for Silva to advocate for his point of view - it's essentially the tack Dan Brown has taken towards the Catholic Church - but this seemed less out in the open, and I resented it. With Dan Brown, I think you at least know what you're getting, and that's all I really ask.

Jamestown Residents Ate One Another (and other tidbits from The Shipwreck that Saved Jamestown, #25)

I read Lorri Glover and Daniel Blake Smith's account of Sea Venture shipwreck at Bermuda in 1609 and its effect on Jamestown at the end of June, and thoroughly enjoyed it. For the most part, The Shipwreck that Saved Jamestown is pretty readable - it's stuffed with facts but with the exception of a slightly slow first chapter, it rolls along well.

I read this book as part of a larger research project that I'm still working on, and feel like I could probably recite the details of every page for you - but I'll resist the temptation. The basic story is that in 1609, the Jamestown colony is floundering, and after a massive PR campaign, the Virginia company puts together nine ships filled with new colonists and supplies. During the trip, the ships get caught in a hurricane and the lead ship, the Sea Venture, gets separated and eventually hits upon Bermuda. Although it was known as the Isle of Devils, the passengers and crew soon discover that the uninhabited island can more than meet their needs. In the end, the shipwreck survivors manage to build two new ships and about a year, they reach Jamestown, much to everyone's shock, and find the settlement on the brink of devastation. Things had been so bad that during the previous winter, the colonists had resorting to eating their dead - hence the title of this post. Essentially, through a series of coincidences - or miracles, as the colonists believed - they survive and then manage to save the colony...which of course is very important for those of us later born in America. (OMG, without the shipwreck, I could be Italian! Or Dutch!)

But all kidding aside, The Shipwreck that Saved Jamestown is a pretty good book. It could totally give Cleopatra or Unbroken or The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, the other historical non-fiction tomes I was planning to read this year (and haven't yet) a run for their money.

Remembering, Rereading Sweet Valley High (#19-24)

For a reason that now eludes me, probably (despite?) my recent foray into Sweet Valley Confidential, I was inspired to reread the beginnings of the Sweet Valley High series. I think I was curious to see if there was anything to the books or if I had just been a very confused 12-year-old in need of an older sister to properly explain the birds and the bees and what high school would be like and all that.

I read books one and two - Double Love and Secrets - again in 2008, and so I acquired books three through seven - Playing with Fire, Power Play, All Night Long, Dangerous Love, and Dear Sister -PLUS Perfect Summer, the Sweet Valley High Special Edition, though Amazon.com. Then I spent a few June afternoons lying in a pool chair devouring this inane goop - and it was awesome.

There's nothing much to say about these books except that oddly some of the book jacket copy misrepresents what the books are about. (The book seven jacket copy for Dear Sister, my personal favorite, says that Todd and Jessica are pondering life without Elizabeth as she lies in a coma but the book is mostly about her odd personality change once she wakes up. Sheesh.) But what I enjoyed was the experience, the trip down memory lane, and the reminder that summer is supposed to contain some element of fun. As adults, I think we get so lost in the hustle and bustle, and it was really great to spend a couple hours slowing down and remembering all those little, silly things that I liked to do as a kid. And for that, I give these preposterously awful, awesome books five stars.

Oh, by the way, Cracked has a completely awesome guide to ghostwriting Sweet Valley High books. You must click, yes, go on!

Nefertiti and Outliers in Brief (#17, 18)

Sorry, I lied when I said we were talking about Sweet Valley High next. I forgot about these two books, both of which I mostly enjoyed when I read them at the beginning of the summer but now am grasping to remember.

I read Michelle Moran's Nefertiti first, inspired to check out her other books after the fabulousness which was Madame Tussaud. I don't know why I chose this one, her first, of all her Ancient Egypt-set books though it may have been the only immediately available at the library. Nefertiti, as the name implies, is about the famous Egyptian queen and fictionally explores her cunning rise to power through the eyes of her younger sister Mutny. Nefertiti becomes a second wife to Pharaoh Akhenaten and then basically struggles to outwit and overcome Kiya, his first wife (and the presumed mother to King Tut), and keep Akhenaten's outrageous ideas under control; Mutny, on the other hand, would just like out of the palace intrigues and to live a peaceful life tending her garden. Although some Amazon reviews criticized it for having thin characters, I found Nefertiti entertaining enough for a summer read, though clearly Moran's writing style has, not suprisingly, significantly improved since this first book.

After Nefertiti, I tackled Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers, which I'd had on my bookshelf for ages. I'd wanted to read it after my mom had told me about hearing him speak at a business conference; the topic had apparently been on the part of the book that explores the hours of practice (10,000) it takes to be successful in any given field. Based on that, I expected that the book's message would be about the link between hard work and success, but that's not really what it was about at all. It was more about how people are randomly, statistically chosen for success and it doesn't have all that much to do with talent. For example, if you want to be a successful hockey player, you'd better have been born in January because kids are filtered into gifted programs at an early age and the hockey cut-off is December 31 - meaning that the January kids are likely bigger (being older) and from there, the advantages of being in gifted programs accrue and once you're slated into a track, it's hard to get out of it.

I think the premise is supposed to be uplifting in that there's no such thing as extraordinary individuals (uplifting for those who are not) but rather success is a combination of various societal factors that you have no control over. But personally, I found the whole thing depressing. If success is based on uncontrollable random elements and things set in motion before you were born, why bother trying? While his theory may be true, I felt that it lacked personal responsibility, that duty to get up and do your best to do your thing every single day. Still though, the anecdotes were fascinating, and I've repeated one or two in conversation.

Admittedly though, I was hooked to Outliers from page one, mostly because of a random (!) personal connection. The first story is about immigrants from Roseto, which is the little town in southern Italy that my great-grandfather was from. In the book, Gladwell tells how a bunch of Rosetians moved to Pennsylvania, to a small town they appropriately named Roseto, and a couple of researchers discovered that in the 50s and 60s they had an abnormally low rate of heart disease, which ended up being because of strong community bonds. Unfortunately for my great-grandfather, he chose to emigrate to a different Pennsylvania town, Philadelphia - where he died of a heart attack in the mid-1950s. :(

An Aside: All Over the Map cover error and Laura Fraser's book lists

A good chunk of Laura Fraser's All Over the Map takes place in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, which is why I was surprised to see that the art director decided to go with a photograph of a different Mexican city on the cover. The top photo is bizarrely of the neighboring city of Guanajuato and the only reason that I know that is that I took a nearly identical photo when I was there a year and a half ago. Maybe the stock image was mislabeled? That's the only explanation I can come up with.

 

In other news, as I was browsing the web a moment ago, I discovered that Laura Fraser is a dork like me and also keeps lists of the books she's read. And apparently she's grappled with similar questions that I've had about my list and plan to blog about, which essentially distills down to this: Do all books make the list or are some not worthy? However, she says her list has made her pickier - "seeing the titles line-by-line brings home the realization that the number of books one can read in a lifetime — maybe 5000? — is finite" - while I'm still reading utter crap. Alas.

The Lovers and All Over the Map: F*ing depressing if you ask me (#14, 16)

I read Vendela Vida's The Lovers and Laura Fraser's All Over the Map just days apart all the way back at the beginning of June. I picked them up for different reasons - though I'd read several good reviews on The Lovers, it didn't seem like my cup of tea but was convinced to pick it up after I saw Vida was the screenwriter of Away We Go, the wonderful but alas underappreciated John Krasinski-Maya Rudolph film about an expectant couple looking for a new home. (To be honest, I was also inspired by the title of her other novel: Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name. How awesome is that?) I went for All Over the Map after realizing there was a sequel to the wonderful An Italian Affair, Fraser's sweet memoir of finding love on an Italian island. I read them practically back-to-back simply because of library schedules and unfortunately, I left the experience fairly disappointed in both books (though highly amused by the All Over the Map cover photo).

Both works follow the trend in women's fiction of depicting the life of a disappointed woman in middle age trying to recover something of a lost self...and it's fucking depressing. I get that in the end, the protagonist will have some sort of epiphany that will free her from the bonds of being a woman in the Western world but I have never particularly enjoyed the journey of these books…it’s like hundreds of pages of melancholy and bad choices and quicksand which five pages of redemption at the end can hardly make up for.

Specifically, The Lovers is the fictional story of the recently widowed Yvonne, who decides to spend a week in a rented house on Turkey's Datca Peninsula, hoping to recapture some part of herself at her honeymoon spot. But then it turns out she wasn’t really happily married and her daughter has problems and she befriends a little kid named Ahmet and then there’s a tragic accident and blah blah blah. But there's an epiphany at the end, all is well! Ugh.

In fact, there was a passage on page 211 that I thought summed up the book nicely: “She had traveled to Turkey to regain something of what she had had with Peter decades earlier – and failing that, she had befriended a boy. A Turkish boy who spoke nothing of her language. And now he was gone, and she was again searching for some remnant of someone she had lost. Had she ever been so lost herself? She must have seemed – to Ozlem, to Ali, to Mustafa – profoundly so. A sad, aging woman with no anchor.” See what I mean? This book was hard to take, reminding me quite a bit of Anita Shreve novels.

I did like All Over the Map quite a bit better but like The Lovers, it seemed to have an excess of angst. The book starts out with an encounter with the Professor, the other half of her glorious Italian affair – she meets him in Oaxaca, Mexico, for her 40th birthday and he effectively dumps her, as he’s met someone else in Paris that he wants to settle down with. And Fraser feels pulled in two directions – she wants to be free and travel but then she also wants the love and stability of a relationship…and now that she’s turning 40, she sort of wonders if she’s missed the boat.

I found that I was continually frustrated with her, the narrator, and my overwhelming thought was how can you bitch about what you have (which seems like a lot, a career most travel writers would give their right arm for – or left, depending on which hand you write with) and keep actively creating what you have if you really want something else? She also really downplayed her career which I found annoying, probably because I am in the same field - magazines are sending her to Samoa, Mexico, Italy, etc., and she's published two books, but her career is not going well? I found that hard to believe and kept wondering why she was presenting herself as a sad sack (though I know self-image and how others see you can wildly differ). I mostly just wanted to reach through the pages and tell her to snap out of it.

On the bright side, you know what we're going to talk about next? Sweet Valley High, that mythical place in California where no one has even heard the word depression, all because I decided to take a trip down memory lane...