... AND WHAT I THINK OF IT
(all reviews as have been posted on Goodreads.com)
Most Recent Read
THE BOOKS OF JACOB by Olga Tokarczuk (4 of 5 stars)
Buried in our collective unconscious there must be a yearning for a coming Messiah, a Saviour for our troubled world. Growing up in the Gospel Church, Sunday night sermons often focused on the Second Coming of Jesus. Back 60 years ago it was to be any day now, foretold by the current events on the front pages of the newspaper. I suspect it is still preached the same way now.
This yearning can enthrall us to cult leaders like David Koresh or Jimmy Jones. To authoritarian politicians as well. These figures make the world make sense, simplistic sense, and lift their followers from the trauma and tedium of human existence. They provide something to believe in and dedicate oneself to. These iconic figures form a loyal cadre of ideologues around them, set themselves and their followers against the rest of the world.
Until I read The Books of Jacob I thought that this was something of a 20th or 21st Century phenomenon. Nope.
This Nobel Prize winning novel is historical fiction focusing around just such a figure in the late 18thCentury. Born a Jew, an adopter of the Islamic faith and then baptized as a convert to Christianity, Jacob Franks (the name he ended his life with) saw himself as the third in a series of Messiahs to come to the Jewish people. He got himself quite a following. He rose to consort with high church officials, the rich and the powerful. He indulged himself on the donations of his followers, and sexually with the women in his movement. He was a charismatic teacher with a vision of eternal life based on the proper beliefs he propelled.
In reading the novel, you find yourself both drawn to and repulsed by the man.
Selecting this book, I got myself into more than I had bargained for. It took me months to finish it. Running about 1000 pages, it is constructed as a series of connected vignettes in chronological succession, involving more characters than a reader can be expected to keep straight. Characters even change names as they change their religious affiliations. It’s a lot to keep track of. But then, as a reader, you find yourself carried along by one little curiosity after another. A rich context for the character of Jacob Frank is created around him.
Once you’ve read this book, you are unlikely to forget this story but will see it still arising in newspaper accounts of authoritarian political and religious figures, over and over again. You will hear threads of this story preached from the pulpits. And, you can hope you won’t be drawn in.
Buried in our collective unconscious there must be a yearning for a coming Messiah, a Saviour for our troubled world. Growing up in the Gospel Church, Sunday night sermons often focused on the Second Coming of Jesus. Back 60 years ago it was to be any day now, foretold by the current events on the front pages of the newspaper. I suspect it is still preached the same way now.
This yearning can enthrall us to cult leaders like David Koresh or Jimmy Jones. To authoritarian politicians as well. These figures make the world make sense, simplistic sense, and lift their followers from the trauma and tedium of human existence. They provide something to believe in and dedicate oneself to. These iconic figures form a loyal cadre of ideologues around them, set themselves and their followers against the rest of the world.
Until I read The Books of Jacob I thought that this was something of a 20th or 21st Century phenomenon. Nope.
This Nobel Prize winning novel is historical fiction focusing around just such a figure in the late 18thCentury. Born a Jew, an adopter of the Islamic faith and then baptized as a convert to Christianity, Jacob Franks (the name he ended his life with) saw himself as the third in a series of Messiahs to come to the Jewish people. He got himself quite a following. He rose to consort with high church officials, the rich and the powerful. He indulged himself on the donations of his followers, and sexually with the women in his movement. He was a charismatic teacher with a vision of eternal life based on the proper beliefs he propelled.
In reading the novel, you find yourself both drawn to and repulsed by the man.
Selecting this book, I got myself into more than I had bargained for. It took me months to finish it. Running about 1000 pages, it is constructed as a series of connected vignettes in chronological succession, involving more characters than a reader can be expected to keep straight. Characters even change names as they change their religious affiliations. It’s a lot to keep track of. But then, as a reader, you find yourself carried along by one little curiosity after another. A rich context for the character of Jacob Frank is created around him.
Once you’ve read this book, you are unlikely to forget this story but will see it still arising in newspaper accounts of authoritarian political and religious figures, over and over again. You will hear threads of this story preached from the pulpits. And, you can hope you won’t be drawn in.
FIVE STAR REVIEWS! - the books I really love and highly recommend.
THE DARK THREADS by Jean Davis (5 of 5 stars)
It was a profound shame that I felt, shame of a profession I once practiced. That, and deep respect for a buried resiliency that allowed an adolescent to survive the minions of that profession.
If the quality, the integrity, the legitimacy of a book lies in its capacity to make the reader feel, this book rises far above others. I’ve read many books within the mental health industry. This one made me feel, deeply.
The Dark Threads is a memoir written decades after five troubled years in the author’s life. It reads like fiction, first person narration, but tells a tale that sadly is not fictional. Memoir writing can be self-ingratiating, a bit proud. Not The Dark Threads. We are taken into the private life of a shy girl and the profound insensitivity of the profession she encountered when she looked for help.
The story is not whiny. It could’ve been for all the harm done to that girl. But it is a Kafkaesque. A litany of mind numbing, brain damaging practices flow from a single professional practice: an adolescent’s struggle and distress is considered to be symptom, the symptom is attached to a diagnosis, the diagnosis begs a treatment and thus the harm begins. The harm came in the form of powerful drugs, electroconvulsive treatment, and dehumanizing, infantilizing practices of ward experiences. The adverse impacts of all these were profound, adverse impact and no benefit.
And this is where my sense of shame comes in. Just a few years after the author’s experience I entered the profession, not as a psychiatrist, but on my journey to be a psychologist practicing within the mental health industry. What author Jean Davison describes I experienced, not from the point-of-view of the patient but as a professional expected to engage in that same dehumanizing practice: take struggle and suffering and call it symptom, add symptoms together to create diagnosis, apply treatment.
Davison is careful to acknowledge that what was done to her may have been necessary or helpful for others. Davison also shines a light of hope through the genuine and human response to her by certain helpers she did eventually encounter along the way. Ultimately, this is a story of a core strength, of a core intelligence within her that told her she had to get out of the clutch of psychiatry. Once she did she was able to reclaim the sanity that had always been within. Her intelligence was that she could question. And in questioning she could decide for herself what would be her life.
Bravo.
It was a profound shame that I felt, shame of a profession I once practiced. That, and deep respect for a buried resiliency that allowed an adolescent to survive the minions of that profession.
If the quality, the integrity, the legitimacy of a book lies in its capacity to make the reader feel, this book rises far above others. I’ve read many books within the mental health industry. This one made me feel, deeply.
The Dark Threads is a memoir written decades after five troubled years in the author’s life. It reads like fiction, first person narration, but tells a tale that sadly is not fictional. Memoir writing can be self-ingratiating, a bit proud. Not The Dark Threads. We are taken into the private life of a shy girl and the profound insensitivity of the profession she encountered when she looked for help.
The story is not whiny. It could’ve been for all the harm done to that girl. But it is a Kafkaesque. A litany of mind numbing, brain damaging practices flow from a single professional practice: an adolescent’s struggle and distress is considered to be symptom, the symptom is attached to a diagnosis, the diagnosis begs a treatment and thus the harm begins. The harm came in the form of powerful drugs, electroconvulsive treatment, and dehumanizing, infantilizing practices of ward experiences. The adverse impacts of all these were profound, adverse impact and no benefit.
And this is where my sense of shame comes in. Just a few years after the author’s experience I entered the profession, not as a psychiatrist, but on my journey to be a psychologist practicing within the mental health industry. What author Jean Davison describes I experienced, not from the point-of-view of the patient but as a professional expected to engage in that same dehumanizing practice: take struggle and suffering and call it symptom, add symptoms together to create diagnosis, apply treatment.
Davison is careful to acknowledge that what was done to her may have been necessary or helpful for others. Davison also shines a light of hope through the genuine and human response to her by certain helpers she did eventually encounter along the way. Ultimately, this is a story of a core strength, of a core intelligence within her that told her she had to get out of the clutch of psychiatry. Once she did she was able to reclaim the sanity that had always been within. Her intelligence was that she could question. And in questioning she could decide for herself what would be her life.
Bravo.
PRIDE AND PREJUDICE by JANE AUSTEN (5 of 5 stars, I suppose)
What dare I say about this well-loved classic?
To be honest … I struggled with it, had to persist to read through to the end.
And why did I decide to read it in the first place? Well, there’s a chance I might take in Pride and Prejudice on stage this spring. What better preparation than to read the original novel? And thus, I venture into an era of literature I hadn’t explored before.
To my naïve surprise, in 200 years since Pride and Prejudice was written the meanings and use specific words are different and the manner in which thoughts are structured and characters are portrayed has changed. Gradually, with the reading I adapted to the nature of the writing, learned to decode the thoughts of the main character, appreciated the dramatic tensions and intricacies of relationship depicted.
Let me hazard a quick synopsis. We enter a non-working class family (there is probably a better word for that) of five daughters at a time when the three oldest are soon to marry. While of independent means, the wealth of this family is somewhat precarious and the advantageous marriages of these daughters is particularly important for its viability. Interested suitors emerge in this world of politeness and polished civility, personalities clash, and the family navigates this critical period.
We follow the drama through the eyes and thoughts of one of the daughters, the somewhat outspoken and independent minded, Elizabeth. Circling about her comes the enigmatic Mr. Darcy. Misunderstandings of character arise and wind into their complications.
I suspect that Pride and Prejudice has served as a template for how romance and coupling comes to be storied right up into our current time. It seems quaintly at odds with our swipe-left, swipe-right culture of modern dating apps, although both then and now physical attractiveness and observable personality capture the heart. And also, perhaps this novel from 200 years ago changed the way authors write about things, dipping into the treachery of characters, the treachery of one’s own thoughts too.
And if I get to see it acted out on stage … well, I guess I now know who is who and what is what.
What dare I say about this well-loved classic?
To be honest … I struggled with it, had to persist to read through to the end.
And why did I decide to read it in the first place? Well, there’s a chance I might take in Pride and Prejudice on stage this spring. What better preparation than to read the original novel? And thus, I venture into an era of literature I hadn’t explored before.
To my naïve surprise, in 200 years since Pride and Prejudice was written the meanings and use specific words are different and the manner in which thoughts are structured and characters are portrayed has changed. Gradually, with the reading I adapted to the nature of the writing, learned to decode the thoughts of the main character, appreciated the dramatic tensions and intricacies of relationship depicted.
Let me hazard a quick synopsis. We enter a non-working class family (there is probably a better word for that) of five daughters at a time when the three oldest are soon to marry. While of independent means, the wealth of this family is somewhat precarious and the advantageous marriages of these daughters is particularly important for its viability. Interested suitors emerge in this world of politeness and polished civility, personalities clash, and the family navigates this critical period.
We follow the drama through the eyes and thoughts of one of the daughters, the somewhat outspoken and independent minded, Elizabeth. Circling about her comes the enigmatic Mr. Darcy. Misunderstandings of character arise and wind into their complications.
I suspect that Pride and Prejudice has served as a template for how romance and coupling comes to be storied right up into our current time. It seems quaintly at odds with our swipe-left, swipe-right culture of modern dating apps, although both then and now physical attractiveness and observable personality capture the heart. And also, perhaps this novel from 200 years ago changed the way authors write about things, dipping into the treachery of characters, the treachery of one’s own thoughts too.
And if I get to see it acted out on stage … well, I guess I now know who is who and what is what.
THE MOSQUITO by TIMOTHY WINEGARD (5 of 5 stars)
During my four decades of work as a mental health professional I found a number of metaphors useful in capturing the subjective experience of distressed clients. One of those metaphors was the elephant in the living room. It was an elephant that no one dared speak of, this despite the difficulties it created in the family. Typically, the elephant of this metaphor was the substance abuse of a parent.
And now, broadening the perspective from the living room to our entire narrative of human history, I realize what else that elephant is, that thing of which we do not speak. It is the mosquito. Timothy Winegard’s book reveals the mosquito as much more than a slap on the side of the head. Mosquitos are the most deadly predator of our species, have been throughout recorded history.
We tend to think of history in terms of nations with their commerce and isms, battles with their men and weaponry, human progress with its cultures and knowledge. All that anthropocentric history leaves out the most enduring battle of survival on our planet: man versus mosquito.
Well, thanks to Winegard, not any more.
I live at 53 degrees latitude, far enough north that malaria and the other mosquito vectored deadly diseases don’t reek their havoc on us fortunate folk here. Of course, given climate change and planetary warming, even this far north we’re probably not out of the woods yet. In our cooler climate, we tend to think of mosquitos as just annoying. We lather up with pungent chemicals and layer up with long sleeves and long pants. And I guess we’re lucky this far north, lucky that the mosquito’s intrusion in our life is just a brief distraction from the beauty of a hike or the social life of the barbeque. The hum-buzz-slap annoys us but it’s not a battle with deadly disease.
But near the end of the book, Winegard comments that for most of us there will be some connection to the deadly battle between man and mosquito. It turns out to be too true in my case. My father just about died of malaria, contracted when he visited Africa. Professionally, in debriefing a member of the Canadian military I heard a story that suggests to me how potentially, albeit indirectly, the mosquito played a role in the death of a certain young man and in the demise of an entire Canadian regiment.
Winegard’s book will appeal to readers who enjoy exploring of the wide swath of history, with science and medicine thrown in, sparkled with an interesting human narrative or two along the way.
I’m just glad that I didn’t read The Mosquito during the summer here in Canada, that I could do so without checking out that bloody smear on the palm of my hand or scratching that suddenly itchy bump on the back of my leg.
During my four decades of work as a mental health professional I found a number of metaphors useful in capturing the subjective experience of distressed clients. One of those metaphors was the elephant in the living room. It was an elephant that no one dared speak of, this despite the difficulties it created in the family. Typically, the elephant of this metaphor was the substance abuse of a parent.
And now, broadening the perspective from the living room to our entire narrative of human history, I realize what else that elephant is, that thing of which we do not speak. It is the mosquito. Timothy Winegard’s book reveals the mosquito as much more than a slap on the side of the head. Mosquitos are the most deadly predator of our species, have been throughout recorded history.
We tend to think of history in terms of nations with their commerce and isms, battles with their men and weaponry, human progress with its cultures and knowledge. All that anthropocentric history leaves out the most enduring battle of survival on our planet: man versus mosquito.
Well, thanks to Winegard, not any more.
I live at 53 degrees latitude, far enough north that malaria and the other mosquito vectored deadly diseases don’t reek their havoc on us fortunate folk here. Of course, given climate change and planetary warming, even this far north we’re probably not out of the woods yet. In our cooler climate, we tend to think of mosquitos as just annoying. We lather up with pungent chemicals and layer up with long sleeves and long pants. And I guess we’re lucky this far north, lucky that the mosquito’s intrusion in our life is just a brief distraction from the beauty of a hike or the social life of the barbeque. The hum-buzz-slap annoys us but it’s not a battle with deadly disease.
But near the end of the book, Winegard comments that for most of us there will be some connection to the deadly battle between man and mosquito. It turns out to be too true in my case. My father just about died of malaria, contracted when he visited Africa. Professionally, in debriefing a member of the Canadian military I heard a story that suggests to me how potentially, albeit indirectly, the mosquito played a role in the death of a certain young man and in the demise of an entire Canadian regiment.
Winegard’s book will appeal to readers who enjoy exploring of the wide swath of history, with science and medicine thrown in, sparkled with an interesting human narrative or two along the way.
I’m just glad that I didn’t read The Mosquito during the summer here in Canada, that I could do so without checking out that bloody smear on the palm of my hand or scratching that suddenly itchy bump on the back of my leg.
PERMANENT ASTONISHMENT by TOMSON HIGHWAY (5 of 5 stars)
When Tomson Highway was three months short of his seventh birthday he made his first airplane ride. He was off to Indian Residential School, leaving behind his family back in Brochet three hundreds of miles to the north. The Guy Hill Residential School was located near The Pas, Manitoba.
This is the fulcrum of the story. To that point in his life he had lived on the lakes, islands and forests of Northern Manitoba. He’d even been born in the brutal winter cold as his family travelled the sub-arctic north on dogsled. Only about half of his siblings survived coming into this world under such harsh conditions.
Now he was teetering into an entirely different world. With the encouragement of his father, he entered this new world with a sense of adventure and an expectation that he would succeed.
It is this knack to thrive in two very different worlds that Tomson Highway gifts to us in a memoir of the first fifteen years of his life. By the end of Permanent Astonishment we leave him at age 15, soon to go to High School in Winnipeg. Tomson Highway went on to be a concert pianist, a playwright, and a novelist. He is a two-spirited person, a speaker of six languages (both first nations and European).
Throughout this memoir Tomson Highway often referred to his native Cree as a trickster language. The memoir is laced with Cree expressions throughout that illustrate that trickster nature.
Until close to the end of the book, I was annoyed with the inclusion of the Cree in the text—transliterated into long strings of syllables using our English alphabet. I’d skip over them, get to the English word sometimes included in brackets afterward, try to remember the ones that kept recurring. But I always thought I was missing something—that behind these strings of letters was great humour, great depth of meaning or irony that I was just not getting. I imagine that in including them, there was with a smile on Tomson Highway’s face and a twinkle to his eye as the trickster within him brought me into his very special world.
Trickster indeed. By the inclusion of the Cree, Tomson Highway gave me a glimmer of the experience he must have had in entering that Indian Residential School where he was to be taught and his life managed in the English language.
And this is the brilliance of this memoir. Tomson Highway shares the subjectivity of what it must have been like to go to that school hundreds of miles and a culture away from his family. And it wasn’t just a different language (as English speakers might experience French, Spanish or Italian) but in a language linguistically unrelated to the Cree in structure and ways of thought, a language evolved to survive in a very different world with its institutions and values.
But there is another aspect of this. Not only were the words different, but also the way that incidents were recounted. I often had to read passages several times to grasp the sense of them, the cultural context and actions, to try to decode the humour, the specialness, the meaning of it all. As would a seven-year-old boy who had lived his life up until then in tents, dogsleds and canoes but found himself in a three storey building with dormitory beds laid out in neat rows, a school of desks and books.
In Permanent Astonishment Tomson Highway escorts the reader into the stunning beauty of the Canadian sub-arctic. Tomson Highway gentles readers into respect for the great wisdom and skills of a people able to live off the land, surviving the harshest of conditions. Tomson Highway enlivens readers with a sense of playfulness, irreverence and joy—an ebullient optimism and delight.
This is a necessary read for us Canadians, an antidote to our Eurocentrism and ignorance. And damn funny in places too!
When Tomson Highway was three months short of his seventh birthday he made his first airplane ride. He was off to Indian Residential School, leaving behind his family back in Brochet three hundreds of miles to the north. The Guy Hill Residential School was located near The Pas, Manitoba.
This is the fulcrum of the story. To that point in his life he had lived on the lakes, islands and forests of Northern Manitoba. He’d even been born in the brutal winter cold as his family travelled the sub-arctic north on dogsled. Only about half of his siblings survived coming into this world under such harsh conditions.
Now he was teetering into an entirely different world. With the encouragement of his father, he entered this new world with a sense of adventure and an expectation that he would succeed.
It is this knack to thrive in two very different worlds that Tomson Highway gifts to us in a memoir of the first fifteen years of his life. By the end of Permanent Astonishment we leave him at age 15, soon to go to High School in Winnipeg. Tomson Highway went on to be a concert pianist, a playwright, and a novelist. He is a two-spirited person, a speaker of six languages (both first nations and European).
Throughout this memoir Tomson Highway often referred to his native Cree as a trickster language. The memoir is laced with Cree expressions throughout that illustrate that trickster nature.
Until close to the end of the book, I was annoyed with the inclusion of the Cree in the text—transliterated into long strings of syllables using our English alphabet. I’d skip over them, get to the English word sometimes included in brackets afterward, try to remember the ones that kept recurring. But I always thought I was missing something—that behind these strings of letters was great humour, great depth of meaning or irony that I was just not getting. I imagine that in including them, there was with a smile on Tomson Highway’s face and a twinkle to his eye as the trickster within him brought me into his very special world.
Trickster indeed. By the inclusion of the Cree, Tomson Highway gave me a glimmer of the experience he must have had in entering that Indian Residential School where he was to be taught and his life managed in the English language.
And this is the brilliance of this memoir. Tomson Highway shares the subjectivity of what it must have been like to go to that school hundreds of miles and a culture away from his family. And it wasn’t just a different language (as English speakers might experience French, Spanish or Italian) but in a language linguistically unrelated to the Cree in structure and ways of thought, a language evolved to survive in a very different world with its institutions and values.
But there is another aspect of this. Not only were the words different, but also the way that incidents were recounted. I often had to read passages several times to grasp the sense of them, the cultural context and actions, to try to decode the humour, the specialness, the meaning of it all. As would a seven-year-old boy who had lived his life up until then in tents, dogsleds and canoes but found himself in a three storey building with dormitory beds laid out in neat rows, a school of desks and books.
In Permanent Astonishment Tomson Highway escorts the reader into the stunning beauty of the Canadian sub-arctic. Tomson Highway gentles readers into respect for the great wisdom and skills of a people able to live off the land, surviving the harshest of conditions. Tomson Highway enlivens readers with a sense of playfulness, irreverence and joy—an ebullient optimism and delight.
This is a necessary read for us Canadians, an antidote to our Eurocentrism and ignorance. And damn funny in places too!
THE CAIRO TRILOGY
PALACE WALK by NAGUIB MAHFOUZ (5 of 5 stars)
Immersive. A most able and impressive fiction.
Palace Walk irresistibly draws the reader into the intricacies of a Cairo family in 1918. The father is a store owner, well respected in his community. In keeping with highly conservative Muslim values, the mother is confined to the home caring for him and their five offspring. Their three boys (the oldest a half sibling to the others) and two girls are each claiming their own unique personalities and moving toward taking their place in society.
The backdrop to this family drama is the Great War coming to an end. Egypt is occupied by Australian soldiers as an English Protectorate. The urge toward national independence plays out as the family goes about its daily life.
Naguib Mahfouz crafts this novel by focusing in turn on each of the seven family members as they navigate the demands of their culture and the rising political unrest around them. As a reader we are privy to the thoughts, hopes, fears, attractions and impulses of each family member.
Religious and cultural values within this family are highly gendered. Males are allowed their sometimes sordid indulgences and females accept that freedom of movement and self-determination is denied to them. Left to their own desires the two oldest males in the family, the father and the oldest son, pursue their entitlements with debauchery and expectation that all of their desires and needs are to be met
The portrayal of each family member is compelling, creating strong feelings for the reader. Of them all, I was most drawn to the youngest child, a ten-year-old boy. His playful naivete sparkled throughout. Unlike his older brothers he is fearful of but not yet oppressed by the rigid and punitive father, still abiding much of his family life within the context of his mother and older sisters. By the end of the story we are left to wonder if he too will be drawn into the destructive entitlement and arrogance that his culture allows its males to pursue.
And perhaps we will find out in the two novels yet to come in the Cairo Trilogy. Yes, there are two more books, each a generation of time ahead, promising continued insight into the ancient city of Cairo and its Islamic culture, tracking forward into this family’s future.
Oh, and by the way. There's a stunning ending. I didn’t see that coming but in retrospect it makes perfect sense.
PALACE OF DESIRE by NAGUIB MAHFOUZ (4 of 5 stars)
Coming about eight years after Palace Walk, Palace of Desire details the treachery of male desire, entitlement and obsession.
Set in Cairo between the two World Wars, we follow the lives of a father -- al-Sayyid Ahmad, well-respected as a merchant but emotionally distant and demanding in his own home -- and his two sons, Yasin and his younger, half-brother, Kamal. Yasin, brutish and neither respected nor particularly successful, walks totally in his father’s self-indulgent footsteps. Both men live their lives entitled to their nighttime pleasures with alcohol and women. Kamal, a foil to them and a hopelessly ruminant romantic, is deeply obsessed with an unrequited love.
As a sidebar to the story of these male family members we get glimpses of Kamal’s full sisters. Both of them are now married to two brothers, residing in their husbands’ family home with their children. Aisha, the younger is sweet, gentle and well-liked while Khadija combative and generally miserable.
Al-Sayyid Ahmad and Yasin pay lip service to the Qur’an and the Muslim faith but live in pursuit of their own impulses and pleasures, this despite the impact such a life has on the women whom they expect to take care of them. Kamal is quite the contrast. We are frequently submerged by deep dives into the indulgence of Kamal’s thoughts as he struggles with a life that doesn’t turn out in keeping with the fulfillment of his desire.
Through the escapades of Yasin and his father, the reader witnesses basic human decency and interpersonal respect lost as gender is empowered and entitled. The actions of this father and first-born son are an affront -- perhaps iconic of the culture in that time and place, but telling as a misadventure of human nature. For these two men, indulgences are claimed as their right. While occasionally tainted with some remorse or even guilt, callous and self-centred actions are built into their very character.
It would be too easy for a modern western reader to just dismiss this as an over-there, back-then. This reading challenges us to wonder about what within our own culture privileges some at the expense of others and allows entitlement and self-indulgence to compromise basic human dignity.
SUGAR STREET
(review yet to come!)
PALACE WALK by NAGUIB MAHFOUZ (5 of 5 stars)
Immersive. A most able and impressive fiction.
Palace Walk irresistibly draws the reader into the intricacies of a Cairo family in 1918. The father is a store owner, well respected in his community. In keeping with highly conservative Muslim values, the mother is confined to the home caring for him and their five offspring. Their three boys (the oldest a half sibling to the others) and two girls are each claiming their own unique personalities and moving toward taking their place in society.
The backdrop to this family drama is the Great War coming to an end. Egypt is occupied by Australian soldiers as an English Protectorate. The urge toward national independence plays out as the family goes about its daily life.
Naguib Mahfouz crafts this novel by focusing in turn on each of the seven family members as they navigate the demands of their culture and the rising political unrest around them. As a reader we are privy to the thoughts, hopes, fears, attractions and impulses of each family member.
Religious and cultural values within this family are highly gendered. Males are allowed their sometimes sordid indulgences and females accept that freedom of movement and self-determination is denied to them. Left to their own desires the two oldest males in the family, the father and the oldest son, pursue their entitlements with debauchery and expectation that all of their desires and needs are to be met
The portrayal of each family member is compelling, creating strong feelings for the reader. Of them all, I was most drawn to the youngest child, a ten-year-old boy. His playful naivete sparkled throughout. Unlike his older brothers he is fearful of but not yet oppressed by the rigid and punitive father, still abiding much of his family life within the context of his mother and older sisters. By the end of the story we are left to wonder if he too will be drawn into the destructive entitlement and arrogance that his culture allows its males to pursue.
And perhaps we will find out in the two novels yet to come in the Cairo Trilogy. Yes, there are two more books, each a generation of time ahead, promising continued insight into the ancient city of Cairo and its Islamic culture, tracking forward into this family’s future.
Oh, and by the way. There's a stunning ending. I didn’t see that coming but in retrospect it makes perfect sense.
PALACE OF DESIRE by NAGUIB MAHFOUZ (4 of 5 stars)
Coming about eight years after Palace Walk, Palace of Desire details the treachery of male desire, entitlement and obsession.
Set in Cairo between the two World Wars, we follow the lives of a father -- al-Sayyid Ahmad, well-respected as a merchant but emotionally distant and demanding in his own home -- and his two sons, Yasin and his younger, half-brother, Kamal. Yasin, brutish and neither respected nor particularly successful, walks totally in his father’s self-indulgent footsteps. Both men live their lives entitled to their nighttime pleasures with alcohol and women. Kamal, a foil to them and a hopelessly ruminant romantic, is deeply obsessed with an unrequited love.
As a sidebar to the story of these male family members we get glimpses of Kamal’s full sisters. Both of them are now married to two brothers, residing in their husbands’ family home with their children. Aisha, the younger is sweet, gentle and well-liked while Khadija combative and generally miserable.
Al-Sayyid Ahmad and Yasin pay lip service to the Qur’an and the Muslim faith but live in pursuit of their own impulses and pleasures, this despite the impact such a life has on the women whom they expect to take care of them. Kamal is quite the contrast. We are frequently submerged by deep dives into the indulgence of Kamal’s thoughts as he struggles with a life that doesn’t turn out in keeping with the fulfillment of his desire.
Through the escapades of Yasin and his father, the reader witnesses basic human decency and interpersonal respect lost as gender is empowered and entitled. The actions of this father and first-born son are an affront -- perhaps iconic of the culture in that time and place, but telling as a misadventure of human nature. For these two men, indulgences are claimed as their right. While occasionally tainted with some remorse or even guilt, callous and self-centred actions are built into their very character.
It would be too easy for a modern western reader to just dismiss this as an over-there, back-then. This reading challenges us to wonder about what within our own culture privileges some at the expense of others and allows entitlement and self-indulgence to compromise basic human dignity.
SUGAR STREET
(review yet to come!)
THE REMAINS OF THE DAY bu Kazuo Ishiguro (5 of 5 stars)
There’s something to be said for being the right reader, of the right novel, at the right time.
It doesn’t often happen.
I had no idea such would be for me with The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro. After all, it was about a butler.
I found myself thankful I’d watched all the seasons of Downton Abbey before reading this book. It made the imagining easy, not quite so distant. How iconic that setting of Highclere Castle is, and how the characters and plot elements of The Remains of the Day slide in there.
But that’s not the space this novel asks us to occupy. We’re called to an interior space, a space of memory and musings, of trying to put one’s mental finger on something.
And that’s what was so relevant for me.
Our central character, the one who’s mind we’re beckoned into, is a butler at the tail (tale?) end of his career. To say that he was strongly identified with his profession pathetically misses the extent of how it had come to dominate his mind. After all the skills, and the good judgment and insight into human nature that he’d honed over his career our Mr. Stevens is still left trying to identify what the essence of it all is. He names it--dignity--but even in doing so struggles to define that palpable but irreducible quality.
And that’s where the right-reader/right-time comes in for me. Like Stevens I became strongly identified with my former career as a psychotherapist. I should hope I developed the skills, judgment and insight into human nature entailed in doing it well. And yet after being embedded for decades and subjectively knowing what the essence of it all was, it’s still a struggle to define that palpable but irreducible something, to convince one’s self of its worth.
Of course for me, I name the essence of psychotherapy as humanistic engagement -- the recognition that in the midst of the distress, functional difficulties, stressful circumstances, hurtful or unsatisfying relationships there is a human being carrying their unique subjective experience. The psychotherapist’s job is to meaningfully relate to that subjectivity. Try putting your finger definitively on that! We can identify elements like attunement, and humour, and kindness, and empathy but can never exhaustively carve out that space.
Oh, and one final thing. Alongside of the naming and the attempts to define, Ishiguro has his Stevens struggle with the meaning, with the value, of what he spent his life doing -- attempting to justify that it was a worthy way to spend the life that is tailing off towards its close. Ah, the existentialist’s plight.
Timely for this reader.
There’s something to be said for being the right reader, of the right novel, at the right time.
It doesn’t often happen.
I had no idea such would be for me with The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro. After all, it was about a butler.
I found myself thankful I’d watched all the seasons of Downton Abbey before reading this book. It made the imagining easy, not quite so distant. How iconic that setting of Highclere Castle is, and how the characters and plot elements of The Remains of the Day slide in there.
But that’s not the space this novel asks us to occupy. We’re called to an interior space, a space of memory and musings, of trying to put one’s mental finger on something.
And that’s what was so relevant for me.
Our central character, the one who’s mind we’re beckoned into, is a butler at the tail (tale?) end of his career. To say that he was strongly identified with his profession pathetically misses the extent of how it had come to dominate his mind. After all the skills, and the good judgment and insight into human nature that he’d honed over his career our Mr. Stevens is still left trying to identify what the essence of it all is. He names it--dignity--but even in doing so struggles to define that palpable but irreducible quality.
And that’s where the right-reader/right-time comes in for me. Like Stevens I became strongly identified with my former career as a psychotherapist. I should hope I developed the skills, judgment and insight into human nature entailed in doing it well. And yet after being embedded for decades and subjectively knowing what the essence of it all was, it’s still a struggle to define that palpable but irreducible something, to convince one’s self of its worth.
Of course for me, I name the essence of psychotherapy as humanistic engagement -- the recognition that in the midst of the distress, functional difficulties, stressful circumstances, hurtful or unsatisfying relationships there is a human being carrying their unique subjective experience. The psychotherapist’s job is to meaningfully relate to that subjectivity. Try putting your finger definitively on that! We can identify elements like attunement, and humour, and kindness, and empathy but can never exhaustively carve out that space.
Oh, and one final thing. Alongside of the naming and the attempts to define, Ishiguro has his Stevens struggle with the meaning, with the value, of what he spent his life doing -- attempting to justify that it was a worthy way to spend the life that is tailing off towards its close. Ah, the existentialist’s plight.
Timely for this reader.
THE GERMAN MIDWIFE by Mandy Robotham (5 of 5 stars)
A study in irony.
The German Midwife (first published in England under the title A Woman of War) by Mandy Robotham takes the reader on a deeply intimate, deeply disturbing journey into a rare corner of the Reich in Nazi Germany.
There is nothing easy about this book. Oh, the writing is flawless in its flow and occasional delights of description or phrase. And the central character, despite the moral dilemma she faces, goes well beyond likeable to be deeply honorable. The context drawn from history is compelling. The human stories shoe-horned into that context are more compelling yet. Setting all that easy aside, this book is hard for the quandary it poses.
That quandary? How to act justly, compassionately, and with love in the midst of the hate and horror created by the pinnacle of human evil.
As an author who herself has been a midwife, Robotham brings detailed realism to the many birth scenes—all are starkly raw in their descriptions and gloriously celebratory in the moments of connection between the newborn and mother. Many of these scenes take place in the birthing barracks of the Concentration Camp with the babies killed shortly after their births. Imagine the abject horror of that. Our central character, midwife Anke, manages to bring the best of her humanity into this bleakest of all human machinations.
Then Anke is pulled from that depth of human depravity to tend to an expectant mother, Eva Braun, on a hilltop estate. Eva is to give birth to the child of her fiancé, Adolf Hitler. Trapped by threats against her and her family perpetrated by Hitler’s Reich, Anke is to assist the coming into the world of his very prodigy.
Ah, the irony.
And if all that is not ironic enough, Robotham resolves the quandary with yet another ironic twist, one that is both grim, hopeful and faintly satisfying.
There’s nothing easy about this story. It is definitely a five-star read.
A study in irony.
The German Midwife (first published in England under the title A Woman of War) by Mandy Robotham takes the reader on a deeply intimate, deeply disturbing journey into a rare corner of the Reich in Nazi Germany.
There is nothing easy about this book. Oh, the writing is flawless in its flow and occasional delights of description or phrase. And the central character, despite the moral dilemma she faces, goes well beyond likeable to be deeply honorable. The context drawn from history is compelling. The human stories shoe-horned into that context are more compelling yet. Setting all that easy aside, this book is hard for the quandary it poses.
That quandary? How to act justly, compassionately, and with love in the midst of the hate and horror created by the pinnacle of human evil.
As an author who herself has been a midwife, Robotham brings detailed realism to the many birth scenes—all are starkly raw in their descriptions and gloriously celebratory in the moments of connection between the newborn and mother. Many of these scenes take place in the birthing barracks of the Concentration Camp with the babies killed shortly after their births. Imagine the abject horror of that. Our central character, midwife Anke, manages to bring the best of her humanity into this bleakest of all human machinations.
Then Anke is pulled from that depth of human depravity to tend to an expectant mother, Eva Braun, on a hilltop estate. Eva is to give birth to the child of her fiancé, Adolf Hitler. Trapped by threats against her and her family perpetrated by Hitler’s Reich, Anke is to assist the coming into the world of his very prodigy.
Ah, the irony.
And if all that is not ironic enough, Robotham resolves the quandary with yet another ironic twist, one that is both grim, hopeful and faintly satisfying.
There’s nothing easy about this story. It is definitely a five-star read.
THE INVENTION OF YESTERDAY by Tamin Ansary (5 of 5 stars)
A wee bit humbled, I am. This book did it for me.
The Invention of Yesterday illustrated in no uncertain terms how uneducated I am, this despite two university degrees. There is so much about this world and its peoples that I didn’t know.
And I thought all that not-knowing was inconsequential. Now I think again.
This is a book documenting history. Not the dry stuff of dates, and the names of kings, and the battles for this or that piece of sod. Certainly, there is some of that in there but that is not the focus of the book. If that had have been all there was to it, I wouldn’t have gotten through it—in the last year I threw into the waste-bin of incomplete reads on my eReader two such books of history.
But not this one.
This book tells the why not just the what. Three fundamental contributing factors (environmental challenge, tools and interconnectedness) interweave in our collective yesterday. Those threads create successions of story that embrace culture and civilization. And thus, eras of history emerge and retreat.
In The Invention of Yesterday 50,000 years of history float by in 450 pages. Sounds impossible, doesn’t it?
Tamin Ansary has done it.
While there were chapters in the book that were a slog, and this probably because of own background ignorance of those civilizations and cultures, most of the book was a delight. Throughout the read I found myself reflecting with Oh, that’s how that worked … or I never connected that with that before … or, So that’s where that came from … or, Gosh, that explains why … . It was all through the book. Those connections were always grounded in those three basic factors—environment, tools, communication. Rather than history being a bunch of dry facts, it suddenly had an overarching story with consistent plotlines acting out familiar roles in an increasingly complex context.
If I have any criticism it is of how the author muted his sense of humour until the last couple of chapters of the book. Maybe it was there all along and I was so captivated by the rest of the content that I missed it. But in those last few chapters—when history had become the present and the present started eking its way into the future—suddenly a dry and provocative humour cuddled the horror of where all this just might be going.
Sure the book entertains, amuses. But don’t read it for that. Read it because the world will make much more sense once you are done.
A wee bit humbled, I am. This book did it for me.
The Invention of Yesterday illustrated in no uncertain terms how uneducated I am, this despite two university degrees. There is so much about this world and its peoples that I didn’t know.
And I thought all that not-knowing was inconsequential. Now I think again.
This is a book documenting history. Not the dry stuff of dates, and the names of kings, and the battles for this or that piece of sod. Certainly, there is some of that in there but that is not the focus of the book. If that had have been all there was to it, I wouldn’t have gotten through it—in the last year I threw into the waste-bin of incomplete reads on my eReader two such books of history.
But not this one.
This book tells the why not just the what. Three fundamental contributing factors (environmental challenge, tools and interconnectedness) interweave in our collective yesterday. Those threads create successions of story that embrace culture and civilization. And thus, eras of history emerge and retreat.
In The Invention of Yesterday 50,000 years of history float by in 450 pages. Sounds impossible, doesn’t it?
Tamin Ansary has done it.
While there were chapters in the book that were a slog, and this probably because of own background ignorance of those civilizations and cultures, most of the book was a delight. Throughout the read I found myself reflecting with Oh, that’s how that worked … or I never connected that with that before … or, So that’s where that came from … or, Gosh, that explains why … . It was all through the book. Those connections were always grounded in those three basic factors—environment, tools, communication. Rather than history being a bunch of dry facts, it suddenly had an overarching story with consistent plotlines acting out familiar roles in an increasingly complex context.
If I have any criticism it is of how the author muted his sense of humour until the last couple of chapters of the book. Maybe it was there all along and I was so captivated by the rest of the content that I missed it. But in those last few chapters—when history had become the present and the present started eking its way into the future—suddenly a dry and provocative humour cuddled the horror of where all this just might be going.
Sure the book entertains, amuses. But don’t read it for that. Read it because the world will make much more sense once you are done.
BLUE SKY KINGDOM by BRUCE KIRKBY (5 of 5 stars)
A few months ago, I read the much lauded Eat Pray Love, still iconic 20 years after publication. I thought that perhaps there must be something to be said for that which has been so celebrated.
Memoir writing, particularly of a travel genre, is tricky I guess. It needs to be personal without being self-obsessed. It needs to celebrate what can be experienced of other places and circumstances without being self-indulgent. It needs to romanticize to amuse a wide swash of readership.
It must be hard to get it right. I suppose a lot of the devotees of EPL have thought it did.
But now I have read another.
Blue Sky Kingdom goes far beyond getting it right. It is deeply moving in authenticity. It is warped through and through with profound respect. It finds beauty within the barren as well as in the majesty of high mountains. It is fully, unabashedly, humble and gentle. It celebrates Buddhist life, not as religion but as a profoundly spiritual way to live. It doesn’t shy away from the difficult, it allows the difficult to transform. It not only acknowledges that life is hard, it participates in the hard.
A Canadian family, mom and dad and two young children, make for a Buddhist monastery in the Indian Himalayas. No, they don’t stay at an Ashram with a set program of spiritual discipline for westerners as did the author of EPL, they live for three months with an elderly Lama in his humble home and participate in the life of the community—life as it has been lived for hundreds (or maybe thousands) of years in a remote mountain valley. They trek in over high mountain passes, often with the father carrying his six-year-old son on his back. They stay long enough to be deeply transformed by the simplicity and hard work of survival as practiced by an ancient and functional people.
In the process the family grapples with the unique characteristics of a son diagnosed on the autistic spectrum. He flourishes under the more natural, less stimulating context. The bonds of relationship within the family deepen.
Throughout the narrative of EPL the author struggled with the emotional baggage she brought with her. I sort of remember there was finally some resolution of that—sort of, there was, wasn’t there? The experience of this Canadian family in the high Himalayan valley couldn’t be burdened by western emotional and cultural baggage, there was enough to carry for basic survival on their trek. No room for a relationship hangover while living with real people, managing real survival in the functional ways of sustainable agriculture and community.
Please don’t read Blue Sky Kingdom if you need to be entertained. There are other books, popular ones, that will provide that for you. Read Blue Sky Kingdom if you seek something that is real.
A few months ago, I read the much lauded Eat Pray Love, still iconic 20 years after publication. I thought that perhaps there must be something to be said for that which has been so celebrated.
Memoir writing, particularly of a travel genre, is tricky I guess. It needs to be personal without being self-obsessed. It needs to celebrate what can be experienced of other places and circumstances without being self-indulgent. It needs to romanticize to amuse a wide swash of readership.
It must be hard to get it right. I suppose a lot of the devotees of EPL have thought it did.
But now I have read another.
Blue Sky Kingdom goes far beyond getting it right. It is deeply moving in authenticity. It is warped through and through with profound respect. It finds beauty within the barren as well as in the majesty of high mountains. It is fully, unabashedly, humble and gentle. It celebrates Buddhist life, not as religion but as a profoundly spiritual way to live. It doesn’t shy away from the difficult, it allows the difficult to transform. It not only acknowledges that life is hard, it participates in the hard.
A Canadian family, mom and dad and two young children, make for a Buddhist monastery in the Indian Himalayas. No, they don’t stay at an Ashram with a set program of spiritual discipline for westerners as did the author of EPL, they live for three months with an elderly Lama in his humble home and participate in the life of the community—life as it has been lived for hundreds (or maybe thousands) of years in a remote mountain valley. They trek in over high mountain passes, often with the father carrying his six-year-old son on his back. They stay long enough to be deeply transformed by the simplicity and hard work of survival as practiced by an ancient and functional people.
In the process the family grapples with the unique characteristics of a son diagnosed on the autistic spectrum. He flourishes under the more natural, less stimulating context. The bonds of relationship within the family deepen.
Throughout the narrative of EPL the author struggled with the emotional baggage she brought with her. I sort of remember there was finally some resolution of that—sort of, there was, wasn’t there? The experience of this Canadian family in the high Himalayan valley couldn’t be burdened by western emotional and cultural baggage, there was enough to carry for basic survival on their trek. No room for a relationship hangover while living with real people, managing real survival in the functional ways of sustainable agriculture and community.
Please don’t read Blue Sky Kingdom if you need to be entertained. There are other books, popular ones, that will provide that for you. Read Blue Sky Kingdom if you seek something that is real.
THE MADNESS OF CROWDS by LOUISE PENNY (5 of 5 Stars)
Ah, the difference between being correct and being right.
The pursuit of scientific enquiry—say, the seeking of an innovative psychiatric cure 70 years ago that goes horrifically wrong or the statistical analysis of the burden of a 21st century pandemic on society's health care system—can lead into morally treacherous territory.
Chief Inspector Armand Gamache encounters first a near miss and then a brutal completion of a murder in the idyllic town of Three Pines. To solve the case he must piece together clues that span decades, the despair and destructiveness that can exist in the depth of human nature, and a plethora of possible motives for murderous actions. He does so while a spate of interesting characters hang around, characters that provide commentary and comic relief for this and other novels in the series—a painter, and a poet, and a particularly crude duck.
For much of the book we wander with him, lost in the woods of potential motives and shrouded histories—trodding along purposely, as if in the snow packed, timbered hillside around the small Anglo town between Montreal and the US border. In the end we come out, a little wiser perhaps, with a satisfying answer to the murderous puzzle—clearly correct but revealing of how morally misguided we humans can be.
Penny sets a high standard for post-pandemic fiction that incorporates the societal lessons to be learned.
Ah, the difference between being correct and being right.
The pursuit of scientific enquiry—say, the seeking of an innovative psychiatric cure 70 years ago that goes horrifically wrong or the statistical analysis of the burden of a 21st century pandemic on society's health care system—can lead into morally treacherous territory.
Chief Inspector Armand Gamache encounters first a near miss and then a brutal completion of a murder in the idyllic town of Three Pines. To solve the case he must piece together clues that span decades, the despair and destructiveness that can exist in the depth of human nature, and a plethora of possible motives for murderous actions. He does so while a spate of interesting characters hang around, characters that provide commentary and comic relief for this and other novels in the series—a painter, and a poet, and a particularly crude duck.
For much of the book we wander with him, lost in the woods of potential motives and shrouded histories—trodding along purposely, as if in the snow packed, timbered hillside around the small Anglo town between Montreal and the US border. In the end we come out, a little wiser perhaps, with a satisfying answer to the murderous puzzle—clearly correct but revealing of how morally misguided we humans can be.
Penny sets a high standard for post-pandemic fiction that incorporates the societal lessons to be learned.
FOUR STAR REVIEWS — pretty darn good, lots of folk will like these
MUSICOPHILIA by OLIVER SACKS (4 of 5 stars).
As neurology is his life work, the appreciation of music must one of his life loves. Oliver Sacks ably integrates both in this fascinating account of how the brain and music intertwine.
Comprised almost entirely of case studies, Sacks illuminates the complexity of the brain’s processing of music. We must depart the facile model of discrete components contributing their own separate functions---within the skull is not at all like under the hood of the car, or the linking together of components in an entertainment system. Instead, in this book we come to appreciate a processing model that is diffuse and interwoven throughout the myriad structures and connections of the human brain.
Through the examinations of what can go wrong through genetics, strokes, atrophy and infection Sacks reveals the complexity of how music is subjectively experienced. From rhythm to pitch to emotion and personal meaning our brain’s work with and through music is complexly interconnected. What seems singular, the production or appreciation of music, is revealed as many facetted.
Rather than a didactic treatise, this collection of thematically related case studies leads us to an inductive appreciation of how the brain works to create the mind. For those unfamiliar with the architecture of the human brain, having a model to refer back to would likely be helpful in the reading of this book. It may also be handy to have a musical library such as a streaming service at hand to hear the pieces referred to.
Sacks weaves into his science a deep appreciation and respect for the human beings whom he has observed and treated in his work as a neurologist. As such there is a strong sense of reverence and humanism in his writing.
This is not a simple read. Just a fascinating one.
As neurology is his life work, the appreciation of music must one of his life loves. Oliver Sacks ably integrates both in this fascinating account of how the brain and music intertwine.
Comprised almost entirely of case studies, Sacks illuminates the complexity of the brain’s processing of music. We must depart the facile model of discrete components contributing their own separate functions---within the skull is not at all like under the hood of the car, or the linking together of components in an entertainment system. Instead, in this book we come to appreciate a processing model that is diffuse and interwoven throughout the myriad structures and connections of the human brain.
Through the examinations of what can go wrong through genetics, strokes, atrophy and infection Sacks reveals the complexity of how music is subjectively experienced. From rhythm to pitch to emotion and personal meaning our brain’s work with and through music is complexly interconnected. What seems singular, the production or appreciation of music, is revealed as many facetted.
Rather than a didactic treatise, this collection of thematically related case studies leads us to an inductive appreciation of how the brain works to create the mind. For those unfamiliar with the architecture of the human brain, having a model to refer back to would likely be helpful in the reading of this book. It may also be handy to have a musical library such as a streaming service at hand to hear the pieces referred to.
Sacks weaves into his science a deep appreciation and respect for the human beings whom he has observed and treated in his work as a neurologist. As such there is a strong sense of reverence and humanism in his writing.
This is not a simple read. Just a fascinating one.
THE ACHEMIST by Paulo COELHO (4 of 5 stars).
From what I can tell by its fame and reviews, The Alchemist is well loved. Cherished, even. For some it is read over and over again.
This reading is my third, each subsequent dip into this allegorical novel has been separated by about a decade of my life. As I pull it forward on my Kindle, I find highlights I’ve made before—pithy little every-day wisdoms, so sprinkled throughout the text.
And yet, on this reading I’m again left by that nagging question of whether or not I truly got it.
So, by way of quite synopsis... this is a story of boy in his teen years who takes what education he got in a local seminary along with a bit of finances his dad had set aside for him, and goes off to pursue his own personal destiny. The story takes him from the pastures of Spain where he cares for sheep he bought with the money from his dad, to Morocco and eventually across the north Sahara Desert to the foot of the pyramids in Egypt.
Along the way he meets a number of interesting characters, several of which have a mystical or magical qualities—a gypsy, an apparition of long dead king, an alchemist. He gains wealth and then loses it. He finds love and then leaves it behind. Throughout the journey he is driven by his own quest for what his life can mean, what is his own personal legend being written through the adventures and misadventures he has.
And in the end, well … you will have to get there yourself.
The read is a bit like the read. We wander through the succession of events much like our protagonist does, perplexed and insecure, but moving forward until it ends. The tale is a bit hallucinatory, like the syncopated non-sequiturs of a nighttime dream.
Perhaps I’ll be drawn back to this book again, a decade from now, and really get it then.
From what I can tell by its fame and reviews, The Alchemist is well loved. Cherished, even. For some it is read over and over again.
This reading is my third, each subsequent dip into this allegorical novel has been separated by about a decade of my life. As I pull it forward on my Kindle, I find highlights I’ve made before—pithy little every-day wisdoms, so sprinkled throughout the text.
And yet, on this reading I’m again left by that nagging question of whether or not I truly got it.
So, by way of quite synopsis... this is a story of boy in his teen years who takes what education he got in a local seminary along with a bit of finances his dad had set aside for him, and goes off to pursue his own personal destiny. The story takes him from the pastures of Spain where he cares for sheep he bought with the money from his dad, to Morocco and eventually across the north Sahara Desert to the foot of the pyramids in Egypt.
Along the way he meets a number of interesting characters, several of which have a mystical or magical qualities—a gypsy, an apparition of long dead king, an alchemist. He gains wealth and then loses it. He finds love and then leaves it behind. Throughout the journey he is driven by his own quest for what his life can mean, what is his own personal legend being written through the adventures and misadventures he has.
And in the end, well … you will have to get there yourself.
The read is a bit like the read. We wander through the succession of events much like our protagonist does, perplexed and insecure, but moving forward until it ends. The tale is a bit hallucinatory, like the syncopated non-sequiturs of a nighttime dream.
Perhaps I’ll be drawn back to this book again, a decade from now, and really get it then.
WHERE THE CRAWDADS SING by DELIA OWENS (4 of 5 stars)
I drifted through passages of absolutely sterling prose in Where the Crawdads Sing in a state of respectful awe. My journey was much like the passage of the protagonist, Kya, in her modest boat navigating the coastal marsh of North Carolina. There are literary delights there, emerging with all the surprise of spotting wild life amongst tangled mosses and still waters. If you are going to read this book, read it for the ecological description. Be transported. Be moved.
This novel carries the powerful story of a woman who survived abuse, marginalization, and sexual exploitation through her own strength and wits. She ended up living her best life. We can only be left with a profound sense of admiration and inspiration in person of Kya. It is a hero’s tale, with an unlikely female in the central role. The novel also documents the underclass of America’s poor and the marginalization of people of colour. The novel has social merit for those stories told.
And there was something uniquely satisfying about the murder victim being an entitled, privileged, and esteemed male—star quarterback for the football team.
Amongst the small handful of characters, two stood out as complex and satisfying in my reading of Crawdads. Kya will live on my mind, and I will hold onto her with a profound sense of respect. And there was a black man, operating the little store and fueling depot of a dilapidated marina. His name was Jumpin’ and he eked goodness. He’ll stay with me too.
But sadly, the other characters in the novel are stereotyped and two dimensional. There’s that high school’s star quarterback, a gaggle of shallow and cliquish girls, a socially awkward but kind fellow, a brilliant trial lawyer, a publisher in a tweed jacket, an abusive neglectful father, a couple of police just doing their job. Compared with the richness and depth of description for the natural world and of the protagonist, these cardboard humans lacked substance and dimension. From them, a reader receives the plot of the novel and little else.
Part way through the book I lamented to a friend that the novel seemed “oh, so very American”. It took a few days after reading for me to settle on what that Americanization was. This is yet another tale of American exceptionalism—the ethos of anyone in the Great-Country-of-America, no matter how humble their beginnings, can individually rise to greatness, can do so using their own unique gifts and perseverance. Oh, that awesome strength of American Individualism.
I suspect that for readers in the USA this book feeds their need for self-indulgent satisfaction and affirmation. For non-American readers this theme is so tawdry and overplayed in American culture that it breeds resentment and distaste rather than respect.
For this reader, it suggests in the future I will stay away from American literature.
I drifted through passages of absolutely sterling prose in Where the Crawdads Sing in a state of respectful awe. My journey was much like the passage of the protagonist, Kya, in her modest boat navigating the coastal marsh of North Carolina. There are literary delights there, emerging with all the surprise of spotting wild life amongst tangled mosses and still waters. If you are going to read this book, read it for the ecological description. Be transported. Be moved.
This novel carries the powerful story of a woman who survived abuse, marginalization, and sexual exploitation through her own strength and wits. She ended up living her best life. We can only be left with a profound sense of admiration and inspiration in person of Kya. It is a hero’s tale, with an unlikely female in the central role. The novel also documents the underclass of America’s poor and the marginalization of people of colour. The novel has social merit for those stories told.
And there was something uniquely satisfying about the murder victim being an entitled, privileged, and esteemed male—star quarterback for the football team.
Amongst the small handful of characters, two stood out as complex and satisfying in my reading of Crawdads. Kya will live on my mind, and I will hold onto her with a profound sense of respect. And there was a black man, operating the little store and fueling depot of a dilapidated marina. His name was Jumpin’ and he eked goodness. He’ll stay with me too.
But sadly, the other characters in the novel are stereotyped and two dimensional. There’s that high school’s star quarterback, a gaggle of shallow and cliquish girls, a socially awkward but kind fellow, a brilliant trial lawyer, a publisher in a tweed jacket, an abusive neglectful father, a couple of police just doing their job. Compared with the richness and depth of description for the natural world and of the protagonist, these cardboard humans lacked substance and dimension. From them, a reader receives the plot of the novel and little else.
Part way through the book I lamented to a friend that the novel seemed “oh, so very American”. It took a few days after reading for me to settle on what that Americanization was. This is yet another tale of American exceptionalism—the ethos of anyone in the Great-Country-of-America, no matter how humble their beginnings, can individually rise to greatness, can do so using their own unique gifts and perseverance. Oh, that awesome strength of American Individualism.
I suspect that for readers in the USA this book feeds their need for self-indulgent satisfaction and affirmation. For non-American readers this theme is so tawdry and overplayed in American culture that it breeds resentment and distaste rather than respect.
For this reader, it suggests in the future I will stay away from American literature.
STRANGE GLORY: A LIFE OF DIETRICH BONHOEFFER by Charles Marsh (4 of 5 stars)
So I was curious.
I’d read somewhere about a German theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, how he’d been a part of a plot to assassinate Hitler.
You see in terms of church life, Hitler had taken over. In that takeover he’d been embraced by the German Evangelical Church in the 1930s. But participating in a plot to assassinate him, well that seemed like an unusual sort of thing for theologian Bonhoeffer to do.
And I thought reading about it would fulfil our exhortation to learn from the past. In our last few years I’ve observed the steamy relationship between the former President and the current evangelical church in the United States, how conservative Christians have embraced him. Could these two interlacings of authoritarian leader and organized church be the religious equivalent of the Spanish flu coming back as Covid a century later?
In my curiosity, I sought out this biography of Bonhoeffer.
Now word of explanation, and keep in mind that I’m no scholar of church history. The nature of the German Evangelical Church was quite different from the current evangelicalism in the US. The sense I got from this biography was the German church was quite established and structured—like with bishops and doctrine—the dominant Christian church in the country.
Hitler took over the German Evangelical Church by authoritarian decree as German Chancellor, pushing his agenda for Aryan control of all German institutions. Indeed, the person Hitler appointed as Reichsbishof turned around and granted Hitler himself the title of Summas Episcopus (the head of the State church).
This is where dear Dietrich comes in. He felt that the church should be welcoming of all who would confess belief, including those of the Jewish race, not limited to those Aryan.
A collision course arises between the two. Indeed.
Hitler’s actions by authoritarian decree have a different flavour than Trump’s more recent courting of the American religious conservative movement. Shamelessly in his own pursuit of power, Trump dangled sparkling baubles of attraction before the religiously conservative—moving the American embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, appointing judges who while wearing the badge of religious freedom would limit the freedom of others, that sort of thing. Shamelessly, American religious conservatism accepted the seduction with its promise of power to influence the entire society. So it is different, now by seduction rather than decree.
Anyway, I’ve wondered if by any great repeat of history an American theologian would rise, like Bonhoeffer, to decry the politicization of the church. So far, I don’t think so. And reading the Bonhoeffer biography, perhaps I can understand why.
Hitler had Bonhoeffer executed for his treasonous involvement.
And to be clear here, it seems as though Bonhoeffer had relatively little to do with the assassination plot and struggled with the whole killing aspect of it. But he was rounded up as a result of evading being conscripted into the Nazi army. Then, with the others involved the assassination planning, he was put to death in the dying days of the Nazi regime.
So that’s the central story line.
As someone who believes that pursuit of theological correctness is the devil’s most devious device (although, I’m not a believer in a devil) I still regarded with some interest the evolution of Bonhoeffer’s theological stance. I could even relate to some of where he ended up toward the end of his short life. And that of course, was a pivotal part of this biography as well.
But what I found fascinating was the other subplot of the story. At the small seminary Bonhoeffer created he found companionship with one of his students, Eberhard Bethge. This companionship evolved to become his primary relationship, lasting the rest of his life. The two gave gifts to others signing as a couple, traveled together and shared the deepest of spiritual understandings. While it never was described as being sexual, this relationship is depicted as deeply integral for Bonhoeffer on a spiritual, emotional and companionship level. With the degree of ardor expressed in Bonhoeffer’s letters to Bethge, it’s a stretch to image it was not physical as well.
A biography need not detail sexual behaviour. We can allow privacy of that vulnerable aspect of human identity and life. Indeed these two men were in treacherous territory for it to be revealed if their relationship had extended to the sexual. Both were pastors and one was an internationally esteemed theologian. This whole story takes place with the background of Hitler’s persecution of homosexual persons.
I did a quick dive into commentary on this issue. Understandably, those in conservative religious ideology wanting to claim Bonhoeffer’s theological contributions would certainly declare that a sexual relationship between Bonhoeffer and Bethge is not to be presumed.
Just another curiosity I guess. But it does make the whole story somewhat more human.
Finally, I confess it took me weeks to get through this book (and I didn’t even bother to consult the hundreds of pages of end notes). I was determined, but it was a slog of a read.
As perhaps also is this lengthy review.
So I was curious.
I’d read somewhere about a German theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, how he’d been a part of a plot to assassinate Hitler.
You see in terms of church life, Hitler had taken over. In that takeover he’d been embraced by the German Evangelical Church in the 1930s. But participating in a plot to assassinate him, well that seemed like an unusual sort of thing for theologian Bonhoeffer to do.
And I thought reading about it would fulfil our exhortation to learn from the past. In our last few years I’ve observed the steamy relationship between the former President and the current evangelical church in the United States, how conservative Christians have embraced him. Could these two interlacings of authoritarian leader and organized church be the religious equivalent of the Spanish flu coming back as Covid a century later?
In my curiosity, I sought out this biography of Bonhoeffer.
Now word of explanation, and keep in mind that I’m no scholar of church history. The nature of the German Evangelical Church was quite different from the current evangelicalism in the US. The sense I got from this biography was the German church was quite established and structured—like with bishops and doctrine—the dominant Christian church in the country.
Hitler took over the German Evangelical Church by authoritarian decree as German Chancellor, pushing his agenda for Aryan control of all German institutions. Indeed, the person Hitler appointed as Reichsbishof turned around and granted Hitler himself the title of Summas Episcopus (the head of the State church).
This is where dear Dietrich comes in. He felt that the church should be welcoming of all who would confess belief, including those of the Jewish race, not limited to those Aryan.
A collision course arises between the two. Indeed.
Hitler’s actions by authoritarian decree have a different flavour than Trump’s more recent courting of the American religious conservative movement. Shamelessly in his own pursuit of power, Trump dangled sparkling baubles of attraction before the religiously conservative—moving the American embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, appointing judges who while wearing the badge of religious freedom would limit the freedom of others, that sort of thing. Shamelessly, American religious conservatism accepted the seduction with its promise of power to influence the entire society. So it is different, now by seduction rather than decree.
Anyway, I’ve wondered if by any great repeat of history an American theologian would rise, like Bonhoeffer, to decry the politicization of the church. So far, I don’t think so. And reading the Bonhoeffer biography, perhaps I can understand why.
Hitler had Bonhoeffer executed for his treasonous involvement.
And to be clear here, it seems as though Bonhoeffer had relatively little to do with the assassination plot and struggled with the whole killing aspect of it. But he was rounded up as a result of evading being conscripted into the Nazi army. Then, with the others involved the assassination planning, he was put to death in the dying days of the Nazi regime.
So that’s the central story line.
As someone who believes that pursuit of theological correctness is the devil’s most devious device (although, I’m not a believer in a devil) I still regarded with some interest the evolution of Bonhoeffer’s theological stance. I could even relate to some of where he ended up toward the end of his short life. And that of course, was a pivotal part of this biography as well.
But what I found fascinating was the other subplot of the story. At the small seminary Bonhoeffer created he found companionship with one of his students, Eberhard Bethge. This companionship evolved to become his primary relationship, lasting the rest of his life. The two gave gifts to others signing as a couple, traveled together and shared the deepest of spiritual understandings. While it never was described as being sexual, this relationship is depicted as deeply integral for Bonhoeffer on a spiritual, emotional and companionship level. With the degree of ardor expressed in Bonhoeffer’s letters to Bethge, it’s a stretch to image it was not physical as well.
A biography need not detail sexual behaviour. We can allow privacy of that vulnerable aspect of human identity and life. Indeed these two men were in treacherous territory for it to be revealed if their relationship had extended to the sexual. Both were pastors and one was an internationally esteemed theologian. This whole story takes place with the background of Hitler’s persecution of homosexual persons.
I did a quick dive into commentary on this issue. Understandably, those in conservative religious ideology wanting to claim Bonhoeffer’s theological contributions would certainly declare that a sexual relationship between Bonhoeffer and Bethge is not to be presumed.
Just another curiosity I guess. But it does make the whole story somewhat more human.
Finally, I confess it took me weeks to get through this book (and I didn’t even bother to consult the hundreds of pages of end notes). I was determined, but it was a slog of a read.
As perhaps also is this lengthy review.
A TOWN CALLED SOLACE by MARY LAWSON (4 of 5 stars)
Clara is just seven-years-old. Her older sister has gone missing, run away from home. Daily, Clara keeps watch at the living room window.
And, that is not all. Clara’s elderly next-door neighbour, Mrs. Orchard, has gone into the hospital with heart troubles. Then a strange man goes into Mrs. Orchard’s house, carrying boxes that he puts into the middle of the living room floor. How is Clara going to manage feeding Mrs. Orchard’s cat, Moses, with him staying there?
A Town Called Solace adroitly takes the reader back a half century to a remote town in Northern Ontario, to a simpler time and place. But the complexities of human yearning and human nature persist. The story is told from the point-of-view of those three characters—Clara, Mrs. Orchard, and that strange man, Liam Kane—each seeking solace from the complexity of their lives.
As a reader I was caught up in the subjective lives of these characters, each at a critical and confusing time. They are not living their best lives, perhaps never had, struggling with what circumstance has brought them. But they find that solace in each other. At the beginning of the novel, it is the dying Mrs. Orchard who holds them together. In the end, it is the cat, Moses.
I was captivated by these characters. I didn’t want to rush to the end of the book to find out how it would turn out, I wanted to walk slowly with them, the way that they walk. I felt an affinity to them, content that I had gotten to know them. After the book is closed, they still occupy a place in my heart.
Clara is just seven-years-old. Her older sister has gone missing, run away from home. Daily, Clara keeps watch at the living room window.
And, that is not all. Clara’s elderly next-door neighbour, Mrs. Orchard, has gone into the hospital with heart troubles. Then a strange man goes into Mrs. Orchard’s house, carrying boxes that he puts into the middle of the living room floor. How is Clara going to manage feeding Mrs. Orchard’s cat, Moses, with him staying there?
A Town Called Solace adroitly takes the reader back a half century to a remote town in Northern Ontario, to a simpler time and place. But the complexities of human yearning and human nature persist. The story is told from the point-of-view of those three characters—Clara, Mrs. Orchard, and that strange man, Liam Kane—each seeking solace from the complexity of their lives.
As a reader I was caught up in the subjective lives of these characters, each at a critical and confusing time. They are not living their best lives, perhaps never had, struggling with what circumstance has brought them. But they find that solace in each other. At the beginning of the novel, it is the dying Mrs. Orchard who holds them together. In the end, it is the cat, Moses.
I was captivated by these characters. I didn’t want to rush to the end of the book to find out how it would turn out, I wanted to walk slowly with them, the way that they walk. I felt an affinity to them, content that I had gotten to know them. After the book is closed, they still occupy a place in my heart.
THE LOST APOTHECARY by SARAH PENNER (4 of 5 stars).
Two women, both betrayed in love. Both women walk the streets of London, down to the Thames. One is in search of what she can learn of the other. These two women are united by a glass apothecary's vial, the image of a bear etched into its surface.
These two women are separated by over 200 years of history.
Told from the perspective of three different first-person narrators, The Lost Apothecary crosses the centuries, winding its way with a sense of mystery. Readers will relate to the present day character, a woman in an unfulfilled marriage and life, but will also relish the escape to another place and time, a journey into the history of everyday folk of a different era.
The Lost Apothecary reads as smoothly as the glass surface of that apothecary’s vial. As that vial was pulled from the mud at the side of the Thames, so also is a story of multiple murders pulled from the murk of history.
The novel is a gem, well crafted, told with a sense of the slow reveal. In the end for this reader, it was a bit too tidy, a bit too contrived, a bit too interlaced. But that may be satisfying for other readers.
Two women, both betrayed in love. Both women walk the streets of London, down to the Thames. One is in search of what she can learn of the other. These two women are united by a glass apothecary's vial, the image of a bear etched into its surface.
These two women are separated by over 200 years of history.
Told from the perspective of three different first-person narrators, The Lost Apothecary crosses the centuries, winding its way with a sense of mystery. Readers will relate to the present day character, a woman in an unfulfilled marriage and life, but will also relish the escape to another place and time, a journey into the history of everyday folk of a different era.
The Lost Apothecary reads as smoothly as the glass surface of that apothecary’s vial. As that vial was pulled from the mud at the side of the Thames, so also is a story of multiple murders pulled from the murk of history.
The novel is a gem, well crafted, told with a sense of the slow reveal. In the end for this reader, it was a bit too tidy, a bit too contrived, a bit too interlaced. But that may be satisfying for other readers.
AN OUTSIDER'S GUIDE TO HUMANS by CAMILLA PANG (4 of 5 stars)
Compelling, Challenging, Inspiring.
This book is a must read for all neurotypicals who are in relationship with neurodivergent individuals. It will be particularly helpful for mental health professionals and others who need to develop working relationships with neurodivergent persons such as educators, employers, and healthcare workers. Camilla self-identifies as on the Autistic Spectrum plus struggling with ADHD and Anxiety Disorder. Camilla Pang's analysis of how humans behave is rooted in her understanding of the sciences. She draws analogies from scientific theory to explain and predict the overwhelming complexity of social behaviour that challenges her as a neurodivergent individual. Sometimes the metaphors (and the science they represent) are baffling to the reader, much like life has been for Camilla Pang.
The book is both thoughtful and thought provoking.
Compelling, Challenging, Inspiring.
This book is a must read for all neurotypicals who are in relationship with neurodivergent individuals. It will be particularly helpful for mental health professionals and others who need to develop working relationships with neurodivergent persons such as educators, employers, and healthcare workers. Camilla self-identifies as on the Autistic Spectrum plus struggling with ADHD and Anxiety Disorder. Camilla Pang's analysis of how humans behave is rooted in her understanding of the sciences. She draws analogies from scientific theory to explain and predict the overwhelming complexity of social behaviour that challenges her as a neurodivergent individual. Sometimes the metaphors (and the science they represent) are baffling to the reader, much like life has been for Camilla Pang.
The book is both thoughtful and thought provoking.
HENRI'S LAST GIFT by GILLES JAITOUR (4 of 5 stars)
Upon tending to the last wishes of a recently deceased mentor and friend, Henri, Josh falls into a two week coma. While his earthly existence is suspended, his mind trips into the experience of the afterlife, labelled in the novel as AfterL. There, guided by three previously departed persons including Henri, Josh is lead to heal the trauma of his own life.
AfterL in Jaitour's novel is an existence and experience freed of the theistic ideologies normally attached to concept of the afterlife provided by formal religions. While wondrous and beautiful, it is a place of psychological healing rather than spiritual ecstasy or perdition. As such, the mental experiences of Josh's coma bring a sense of hope, release and meaning.
Jaitour navigates this unmapped, and un-mappable, territory in a way that can leave the reader somewhat disoriented. At times in reading I needed to just go with the flow of the rapidly changing scenes which morphed under the will of the healing guides that accompany Josh.
Henri's Last Gift, is a gift to us as readers, as much as in the narrative it was to the protagonist, Josh. May we, too, come away with life lessons learned.
Upon tending to the last wishes of a recently deceased mentor and friend, Henri, Josh falls into a two week coma. While his earthly existence is suspended, his mind trips into the experience of the afterlife, labelled in the novel as AfterL. There, guided by three previously departed persons including Henri, Josh is lead to heal the trauma of his own life.
AfterL in Jaitour's novel is an existence and experience freed of the theistic ideologies normally attached to concept of the afterlife provided by formal religions. While wondrous and beautiful, it is a place of psychological healing rather than spiritual ecstasy or perdition. As such, the mental experiences of Josh's coma bring a sense of hope, release and meaning.
Jaitour navigates this unmapped, and un-mappable, territory in a way that can leave the reader somewhat disoriented. At times in reading I needed to just go with the flow of the rapidly changing scenes which morphed under the will of the healing guides that accompany Josh.
Henri's Last Gift, is a gift to us as readers, as much as in the narrative it was to the protagonist, Josh. May we, too, come away with life lessons learned.
THREE STAR REVIEWS — I had some trouble with these books, but maybe that was just me.
THE LIGHTKEEPER'S DAUGHTERS by Jean Pendziwol (3 of 5 stars)
A foster teen tags the fence of a nursing home and is assigned restorative rehabilitation to scrape and repaint the fence. While there, she spots on an elderly blind woman’s mantle the exquisite drawing of two dragonflies, a drawing clearly by the same artist of one in her hand-me-down violin case. And so the story of an unlikely pair unraveling the past begins.
Assisted by the journals of the lighthouse keeper from decades before, journals which trigger memories for the elderly woman, the story gradually emerges. Tragic events took place on the island where the lighthouse keeper and his family lived. That story emerges mysteriously, much like a vessel on the foggy lake. Amongst the puzzling details is the discovery by one of the lighthouse keeper’s daughter with a grave that bears her own name.
In the end this novel is both a page-turner and a head-scratcher. With the twists and turns of the story, even after I have finished the read, I continued to puzzle over who-is-who in the tenuous linkages between the foster child and elderly woman.
The Lightkeeper’s Daughters succeeds in immersing us in a distance lonely place, empathetic to the flawed personalities who lived together there. The author had a puzzling story to tell and the literary devices used to tell it left me wishing she could have chosen a simpler tale. The characters in the novel were vivid, the events shocking, but the final package leaves the reader having to work too hard to piece it all together.
A foster teen tags the fence of a nursing home and is assigned restorative rehabilitation to scrape and repaint the fence. While there, she spots on an elderly blind woman’s mantle the exquisite drawing of two dragonflies, a drawing clearly by the same artist of one in her hand-me-down violin case. And so the story of an unlikely pair unraveling the past begins.
Assisted by the journals of the lighthouse keeper from decades before, journals which trigger memories for the elderly woman, the story gradually emerges. Tragic events took place on the island where the lighthouse keeper and his family lived. That story emerges mysteriously, much like a vessel on the foggy lake. Amongst the puzzling details is the discovery by one of the lighthouse keeper’s daughter with a grave that bears her own name.
In the end this novel is both a page-turner and a head-scratcher. With the twists and turns of the story, even after I have finished the read, I continued to puzzle over who-is-who in the tenuous linkages between the foster child and elderly woman.
The Lightkeeper’s Daughters succeeds in immersing us in a distance lonely place, empathetic to the flawed personalities who lived together there. The author had a puzzling story to tell and the literary devices used to tell it left me wishing she could have chosen a simpler tale. The characters in the novel were vivid, the events shocking, but the final package leaves the reader having to work too hard to piece it all together.
WIN AT ALL COSTS by MATT HART. (3 of 5 stars)
With a firm grasp of the particulars, Matt Hart takes us on a marathon of a tale.
Under the corporate auspices of the sportwear brand, Nike, American distance runners strive for ascendancy in the world of athletics that has come to be dominated by Ethiopian and Kenyan runners. Professing to reap the benefits of science, their coach—Alberto Salazar, himself a first place marathoner in his day—seeks to take a new generation of runners to the winner’s circle.
Amongst the athletes coached by Salazar are a couple, Kara and Adam Goucher. They, with Salazar, form the central axis of the tale. As a reader, my empathy goes to the Gouchers and antipathy to Salazar. While seemingly successful at his aim, over the course of the story Salazar is revealed to violate doping rules that put the health and integrity of his runners in jeopardy.
Matt Hart writes from the perspective of a journalist, seeking out iotas of information to provide integrity to his tale. As a reader who is a non-runner, I found the focus on runner’s times and placings to beg the larger question of why a person would be allowed to behave with such disregard for the wellbeing of others and his sport—a sport that is proudly the oldest within the history of western civilization.
The reader is left to draw one’s own conclusions around whence comes the lack of integrity in corporate culture, that and the egoistic dedication of a powerful individual to personal goals that sacrifice decency and humanity. What does this say about American culture?
I found this to be an instance of journalism to create a subjective experience of outrage. A theme all too common in this 21st Century. Are we better off knowing that corporate America is prone to behave in this way, and that seemingly successful individuals may be without morals? Is that all there is to capture our attention?
The goals and behaviours of Alberto Salazar are a tawdry tale of an attempt to create another example of American exceptionalism, this not only through the gifts of his athletes but also through seeking every advantage (fair and unfair) that technology and rule bending could provide. Alas, it is only exceptional arrogance and disrespect for others that is revealed.
By the end of the tale, better than 400 pages, I felt as though I had run a marathon myself, weary of the ways of a profoundly distasteful character. But also in the end, our couple, Kara and Adam, do finish their careers with a sense of having maintained their self-respect. And for that, I am grateful.
With a firm grasp of the particulars, Matt Hart takes us on a marathon of a tale.
Under the corporate auspices of the sportwear brand, Nike, American distance runners strive for ascendancy in the world of athletics that has come to be dominated by Ethiopian and Kenyan runners. Professing to reap the benefits of science, their coach—Alberto Salazar, himself a first place marathoner in his day—seeks to take a new generation of runners to the winner’s circle.
Amongst the athletes coached by Salazar are a couple, Kara and Adam Goucher. They, with Salazar, form the central axis of the tale. As a reader, my empathy goes to the Gouchers and antipathy to Salazar. While seemingly successful at his aim, over the course of the story Salazar is revealed to violate doping rules that put the health and integrity of his runners in jeopardy.
Matt Hart writes from the perspective of a journalist, seeking out iotas of information to provide integrity to his tale. As a reader who is a non-runner, I found the focus on runner’s times and placings to beg the larger question of why a person would be allowed to behave with such disregard for the wellbeing of others and his sport—a sport that is proudly the oldest within the history of western civilization.
The reader is left to draw one’s own conclusions around whence comes the lack of integrity in corporate culture, that and the egoistic dedication of a powerful individual to personal goals that sacrifice decency and humanity. What does this say about American culture?
I found this to be an instance of journalism to create a subjective experience of outrage. A theme all too common in this 21st Century. Are we better off knowing that corporate America is prone to behave in this way, and that seemingly successful individuals may be without morals? Is that all there is to capture our attention?
The goals and behaviours of Alberto Salazar are a tawdry tale of an attempt to create another example of American exceptionalism, this not only through the gifts of his athletes but also through seeking every advantage (fair and unfair) that technology and rule bending could provide. Alas, it is only exceptional arrogance and disrespect for others that is revealed.
By the end of the tale, better than 400 pages, I felt as though I had run a marathon myself, weary of the ways of a profoundly distasteful character. But also in the end, our couple, Kara and Adam, do finish their careers with a sense of having maintained their self-respect. And for that, I am grateful.
VANISHING MONUMENTS by JOHN ELIZABETH STINTZ. (3 of 5 stars)
Alani, a gender-non-binary photographer, gets word that hir mother’s dementia has worsened in the care home. Ze makes the journey back to Winnipeg, the city of hir childhood—across the USA/Canada border, sucked back through decades of hir life. In addition to visiting hir mom, there’s the house ze shared with hir mom and its contents to deal with.
Those are non-gender pronouns: hir rather than him or her, ze rather than she or he. Even the two cats in the tale are each individually a they/them/their. Author John Elizabeth Stintzi assists the reader early on in the narrative with the introduction of another character using those pronouns. As the novel is written in the first person but described here in the third, I will use those pronouns for this review.
It is not just the home of hir childhood to which ze returns. Ze submerses hirself in hir memory palace. The memory palace serves as a mnemonic device structuring the last thirty years or so of hir life. It mirrors the physical home Alani shared with hir mother. Much like the way photographs bring into the present a scene of the past, so also the memory palace, triggered by the physical childhood home, brings the events of Alani’s life into hir flow of consciousness. Alani’s has life spanned three different countries. It’s been comprised of times of male, female and non-binary identification.
In her progressive dementia, Alani’s mother has lost the capacity to speak and she is unresponsive to Alani’s presence. Alani’s visits to hir mom in the care home are thus empty of connection. Much like hir mother’s camera, which Alani keeps strung around her neck, Alani’s mom seems like the empty camera—no film inside to register the reality of Alani’s visit.
Told as flow-of-consciousness narration, Alani’s story reverberates between the present and the past. Scenes bounce between Hamburg, Minneapolis and Winnipeg. The characters of significant others from Alani’s life gradually take shape through hir memories. The texture of the novel is the gradual sketching in of relationship details and life events as more memories emerge. Much as images do on a film, the narrative gradually emerges in the developing process.
This is a novel of phrases as much as it is of sentences—phrases that depict idiosyncratic meanings, meanings that disrupt thought. As a straight cis male reader, one having lived more than a couple of decades longer than our forty-ish Alani, most of the read was one of disorientation, disorientation and impatience that it could not have been told in a more straightforward fashion. Early on, I even questioned whether or not it was readable at all. Gradually though, I was drawn into greater ease with the flow with the narrator’s mind. I came to embrace its challenges and unique style.
I noted rampant anthropomorphism throughout, annoyed by it until a realized that such was just another expression of the non-binary nature of Alani’s consciousness.
This was not a rapid read. This was not an easy read. As a work of fiction, this story took me to another landscape—an interior one—vicariously living a different expression of human nature, the different courage of another struggle to be.
Alani, a gender-non-binary photographer, gets word that hir mother’s dementia has worsened in the care home. Ze makes the journey back to Winnipeg, the city of hir childhood—across the USA/Canada border, sucked back through decades of hir life. In addition to visiting hir mom, there’s the house ze shared with hir mom and its contents to deal with.
Those are non-gender pronouns: hir rather than him or her, ze rather than she or he. Even the two cats in the tale are each individually a they/them/their. Author John Elizabeth Stintzi assists the reader early on in the narrative with the introduction of another character using those pronouns. As the novel is written in the first person but described here in the third, I will use those pronouns for this review.
It is not just the home of hir childhood to which ze returns. Ze submerses hirself in hir memory palace. The memory palace serves as a mnemonic device structuring the last thirty years or so of hir life. It mirrors the physical home Alani shared with hir mother. Much like the way photographs bring into the present a scene of the past, so also the memory palace, triggered by the physical childhood home, brings the events of Alani’s life into hir flow of consciousness. Alani’s has life spanned three different countries. It’s been comprised of times of male, female and non-binary identification.
In her progressive dementia, Alani’s mother has lost the capacity to speak and she is unresponsive to Alani’s presence. Alani’s visits to hir mom in the care home are thus empty of connection. Much like hir mother’s camera, which Alani keeps strung around her neck, Alani’s mom seems like the empty camera—no film inside to register the reality of Alani’s visit.
Told as flow-of-consciousness narration, Alani’s story reverberates between the present and the past. Scenes bounce between Hamburg, Minneapolis and Winnipeg. The characters of significant others from Alani’s life gradually take shape through hir memories. The texture of the novel is the gradual sketching in of relationship details and life events as more memories emerge. Much as images do on a film, the narrative gradually emerges in the developing process.
This is a novel of phrases as much as it is of sentences—phrases that depict idiosyncratic meanings, meanings that disrupt thought. As a straight cis male reader, one having lived more than a couple of decades longer than our forty-ish Alani, most of the read was one of disorientation, disorientation and impatience that it could not have been told in a more straightforward fashion. Early on, I even questioned whether or not it was readable at all. Gradually though, I was drawn into greater ease with the flow with the narrator’s mind. I came to embrace its challenges and unique style.
I noted rampant anthropomorphism throughout, annoyed by it until a realized that such was just another expression of the non-binary nature of Alani’s consciousness.
This was not a rapid read. This was not an easy read. As a work of fiction, this story took me to another landscape—an interior one—vicariously living a different expression of human nature, the different courage of another struggle to be.
EVERYTHING I NEVER TOLD YOU by Celeste Ng (3 of 5 stars)
The premise is great.
And the commentary on a cultural issue -- a mixed racial family trying to find a place in America -- that I can get behind.
Celeste Ng takes us inside a family before, after and through a crisis -- he drowning death of an adolescent daughter. No one handles things very well. In her approach to the novel Ng shares the thoughts and perspectives of each of the characters, the omniscient point-of-view. With this approach I found myself drowning in the eddies of perspective much like the poor teen drowned in the lake near the house.
And while the reader can empathize with each family member, to a certain extent anyway, they as characters seem completely unable to empathize with each other. They bounce against each other with misunderstanding and disappointment, struggling for what little of intimacy or companionship that might be found. Everyone misses the mark, except for the youngest who spends a lot of time curled up under the table hearing it all.
I also struggled with an uneven progression of time in the novel. At one point we were after the critical event but then later we were back before it. Alas. Head-scratch. Okay, I guess.
This could’ve been a powerful story. Maybe it actually is and I just didn’t work hard enough as a reader to be able to appreciate it.
The premise is great.
And the commentary on a cultural issue -- a mixed racial family trying to find a place in America -- that I can get behind.
Celeste Ng takes us inside a family before, after and through a crisis -- he drowning death of an adolescent daughter. No one handles things very well. In her approach to the novel Ng shares the thoughts and perspectives of each of the characters, the omniscient point-of-view. With this approach I found myself drowning in the eddies of perspective much like the poor teen drowned in the lake near the house.
And while the reader can empathize with each family member, to a certain extent anyway, they as characters seem completely unable to empathize with each other. They bounce against each other with misunderstanding and disappointment, struggling for what little of intimacy or companionship that might be found. Everyone misses the mark, except for the youngest who spends a lot of time curled up under the table hearing it all.
I also struggled with an uneven progression of time in the novel. At one point we were after the critical event but then later we were back before it. Alas. Head-scratch. Okay, I guess.
This could’ve been a powerful story. Maybe it actually is and I just didn’t work hard enough as a reader to be able to appreciate it.