MostlyFiction Book Reviews http://bookreview.mostlyfiction.com We Love to Read! Thu, 23 May 2013 12:52:29 +0000 en-US hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5.1 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami http://bookreview.mostlyfiction.com/2011/1q84-by-haruki-murakami/ http://bookreview.mostlyfiction.com/2011/1q84-by-haruki-murakami/#comments Sun, 01 Jan 2012 02:37:21 +0000 Judi Clark http://bookreview.mostlyfiction.com/?p=22307 Book Quote:

“That’s it. 1984 and 1Q84 are fundamentally the same in terms of how they work. If you don’t believe in the world, and if there is no love in it, then everything is phony. No matter which world we are talking about, no matter what kind of world we are talking about, the line separating fact from hypothesis is practically invisible to the eye. It can only be seen with the inner eye, the eye of the mind.”

Book Review:

Review by Devon Shepherd  (DEC 31, 2011)

Haruki Murakami doesn’t lend himself to easy categorization. Though his prose is spare, almost styleless, it’s more supple than muscular, and though his stories are often occupied with mundane domesticities, they’re also often founded in the surreal. It’s no surprise, then, that Murakami’s long-awaited latest, 1Q84, isn’t easy to shelf –it’s at home among either fantasy, thriller or hard-boiled noir – but one thing’s for sure: this book is grotesquely Murakami. That is, quiet domesticity punctuates adventures tenuously connected to reality, and yet for all its faults – and some have argued there are many – this is a book that haunts you long after you’re done, a book that, like a jealous lover, won’t let you move on.

For all its parallel worlds and magical creatures, for all its anonymous sex and ruthless violence, this is a book about love. The lovers in question, Tengo and Aomame, haven’t seen or spoken to each other in almost 20 years. In fact, they may have never spoken at all. Their shared history is limited to a 5th grade incident during which a ten-year-old Aomame reached for Tengo’s hand – and stilled his soul. But for Tengo, a popular athlete and academic star, to befriend Aomame, a religious freak who stands up and shouts a version of the Lord’s Prayer before she eats lunch, would’ve been social suicide. Aomame transfers schools before Tengo acknowledges to himself what she means to him.

Twenty years pass – it’s 1984 – and Tengo, considered a math prodigy, has frittered away his promise: he teaches math at a Tokyo cram school while moonlighting as a novelist. Though he has weekly sex with a married girlfriend, he still wonders about Aomame.

Disowned by her family for breaking with their church, the Society of Witnesses, Aomame is a lone-wolf. She works as a fitness instructor at a swanky Tokyo gym and although she trolls for wild one-night stands, her heart, after all these years, still belongs to Tengo. As it turns out, she moonlights too –as an assassin. Under the auspices of a wealthy and mysterious dowager, Aomame, with a method of her own invention, kills wife-beaters and rapists.

The Tengo-Aomame attachment – their love itself – is absurd, and this absurdity calls into existence a strange alternative world – 1Q84, the world with a question mark – with a second, “moss-green” moon. Ostensibly, Aomame enters this alternate world, like Alice down the rabbit hole, when she escapes a gridlocked Metropolitan expressway by climbing down an emergency stairwell. But it’s Tengo, in ghost-writing the best-seller, Air Chryaslis, or perhaps in writing a novel of his own, that opens that portal. What has brought Tengo into 1Q84 isn’t entirely clear – although his skill as a storyteller is a factor – but, unbeknownst to the other, both are trapped in 1Q84, a world that becomes increasingly perilous.

When Komatsu, Tengo’s editor, suggests Tengo rewrite a manuscript submission, a fantastical, but compelling story, told in substandard prose, Tengo is hesitant. The author, a strange and beautiful 17-year old girl, who goes by the name of Fuka-Eri, insists that her story, a tale about Little People who emerge from the mouth of a goat and weave wombs out of strands of reality, is true. The Little People use these wombs, or air chrysalises, to gestate doubles, or dohtas. The dohtas act like antennas of sorts, receivers for the perceivers of “the voice.” Fuka-Eri has no literary ambitions and gives Tengo permission to rewrite her work.

But when Air Chrysalis is a runaway hit, a powerful and mysterious cult, Sakigake, is angered. Although most people read the book as fantasy, Sakigake maintains that Fuka-Eri, the estranged daughter of their mysterious Leader, has revealed sacred truths not meant for outsiders. It seems they’ll stop at nothing to halt publication, but when their Leader is found dead, Sakigake must devote itself to finding his murderer.

As it turns out, the Leader is suspected of raping pre-pubescent girls, Fuka-Eri, his daughter, among them. The dowager charges Aomame with dispatching the Leader to “the other side,” but when he demonstrates his supernatural powers, Aomame becomes conflicted and confused. A telepath, the Leader knows Aomame’s intention, but the cost of his great gift is excruciating pain. The Leader welcomes death, and when Aomame hesitates, he bargains with her: his death for Tengo’s life. Unfortunately, killing the Leader will likely mean Aomame’s death too. But, in sacrificing her life for Tengo’s, their connection inexplicably tightens, and the danger Aomame flees inadvertently flings them together.

1Q84 is possible because of faith. It is the belief in love, in something beyond reason, something magical, that creates the metaphysical space for impossibilities to actualize themselves. Born from air chrysalises, dohtas are affectless shadows, without desires or dreams of their own. But we only need look around us, at the “hunched over people carried by force of habit into the new day” to see that it’s all too easy to lose your dreams and desires to the monotony of everyday life, individual passions and secret hopes lost to the roles we play – father, mother, teacher, banker – unaware that if you stop and look up, you might just see two moons. Of course, the real problem, as Tengo and Aomame figure out, is not the revelation of the magical, but how to steal a bit of that wonder up the rabbit hole, to the mundane world of day jobs and traffic jams.

Murakami shirks conventional expectations, refusing to answer the questions he poses and tie his loose ends into pretty little bows. He breaks from craft wisdom – stick to the essentials – with gratuitous descriptions and his characters repeatedly mull over the same plot points. He even challenges Chekov’s famous maxim by introducing a gun that never goes off. But I can’t help but feel that’s the point; life isn’t pared down to essentials, and insofar as our lives have meaning, they’re necessarily narratives, stories just as mundane – and hopefully just as magical, if not as fantastical – as this one.

AMAZON READER RATING: from 514 readers
PUBLISHER: Knopf; First Edition edition (October 25, 2011)
REVIEWER: Devon Shepherd
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Haruki Murakami
EXTRAS: Reading Guide and Excerpt
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]]> http://bookreview.mostlyfiction.com/2011/1q84-by-haruki-murakami/feed/ 1 THE FIFTH WOMAN by Henning Mankell http://bookreview.mostlyfiction.com/2011/the-fifth-woman-by-henning-mankell/ http://bookreview.mostlyfiction.com/2011/the-fifth-woman-by-henning-mankell/#comments Mon, 19 Dec 2011 02:10:30 +0000 Judi Clark http://bookreview.mostlyfiction.com/?p=22140 Book Quote:

“When I was growing up, Sweden was still a country where people darned their socks.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  (DEC 19, 2011)

I first read this 1997 novel (the sixth in Henning Mankell’s Inspector Wallander series) in 2004, and saw the television adaptation starring Kenneth Branagh last year. So the general outline was familiar; I even knew who the murderer was going to be. All the same, I read the book this time with just as much enjoyment as on the first occasion, and with even more appreciation of detail of its texture. Unlike most detective novels, this one is less about the eventual solution than the process of getting there. The review from the Rocky Mountain News quoted on the back of my edition has it exactly right: “a police procedural in which the main procedure is thought.”

The first short chapter (following a brief prologue) ends with both a murder and (unusually) a glimpse of the murderer: an elderly man, coming out at night to listen to migrating birds, falls upon a group of sharpened bamboo stakes placed point-upwards in a pit; the person watching his agony from the shadows is a woman. Not that Inspector Wallander and his small team of detectives in Ystad, on the Southern coast of Sweden, realize this at first; the reader almost always knows a thing or two more than they do; the interest comes in seeing how they get there. More victims will follow; although different, the cases seem connected as different phrases in the same language that the murderer is using to communicate with the world. But this is no more than Wallander’s feeling; translating that language, finding factual connections between the victims, deducing the murderer’s motive, all this will be the work of many months.

A few weeks ago, after reading PD James’ THE PRIVATE PATIENT, I wrote a review entitled “TMI” (too much information). For almost 100 pages, James handled nothing but exposition, introducing almost the entire dramatis personae in separate chapters of great detail. Only then could the murder be committed and the work of detection begin. Mankell, by contrast, has almost no exposition at all. He plunges the reader immediately into the daily work of the Ystad police force, investigating an apparently minor crime, a break-in at a flower shop, that will turn out to have greater significance later. Mankell’s great strength is his grip of texture; he reveals information in bits and pieces, as would happen in life. You meet the officers in the station as a group who are doing a job; any personal details you might discover about them come up almost accidentally, just as they might among colleagues in the workplace; the one exception is Wallander, whose family relationships do play a small part, but their effect is to emphasize the difficulty of balancing his personal and professional life. Although this is the sixth book in a series, there is none of those tedious side-bar summaries for those who missed the earlier novels, and the reader has no sense of being left out either. You never doubt that this is a real world, not something concocted for your entertainment.

A less realistic crime novel might filter the information reaching the investigators so that everything is either a Clue or a Red Herring. Mankell does nothing of the sort; business at the Ystad station does not stop for the murders, and much information comes in that has little directly to do with them — things such as the formation of a local vigilante group to make up for the perceived inefficiencies of the police. But vigilantism does turn out to be a running theme in this novel, and yet one more example of Mankell’s underlying subject: the rapid decline of law and order in Sweden. He sees it as an age where it is easier to throw something away than take responsibility for it, an era “when people stopped darning their socks.”

Mankell’s novels have all tended to balance an inner focus on a small area of Sweden against an awareness of the outer world, especially Africa, where Mankell lives for part of each year. Even so hermetic a novel as the excellent Italian Shoes (not a Wallander story) has tentacles reaching into other continents. Of note, in one of his most recent novels, The Man from Beijing, in my opinion the balance tipped too far towards the global scene, losing the meticulous sense of local life which is his anchor. It would appear that The Fifth Woman also has an African connection; the prologue begins with a killing in the Sahara: four nuns and a fifth woman, a Swedish tourist, whose death has been suppressed by the local authorities. The back cover suggests that the fate of this Fifth Woman will be integral to the solution of the case, but the connection is merely catalytic. The true meaning of the title will appear as other women appear in the Swedish shadows, and the half-seen world has deadly impact on the real one.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 50 readers
PUBLISHER: Vintage (August 30, 2011)
REVIEWER: Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:

 
EXTRAS: Excerpt
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]]> http://bookreview.mostlyfiction.com/2011/the-fifth-woman-by-henning-mankell/feed/ 0 BOLTZMANN’S TOMB by Bill Green http://bookreview.mostlyfiction.com/2011/boltzmanns-tomb-by-bill-green/ http://bookreview.mostlyfiction.com/2011/boltzmanns-tomb-by-bill-green/#comments Sun, 18 Dec 2011 16:19:31 +0000 Judi Clark http://bookreview.mostlyfiction.com/?p=22187 Book Quote:

“This is not a book about the great Austrian physicist, Ludwig Boltzmann, nor, despite its importance in my life, is it about Antarctica. It is more about time and chance and the images and dreams we bring with us from childhood which shape who we are and what we become. It is about science and atoms and starry nights and what we think we remember, though we have made it up.”

Book Review:

Review by Bill Brody  (DEC 18, 2011)

Boltzmann’s Tomb: Travels in Search of Science by Bill Green is at once a travelogue and joyous celebration of science. The author is a chemist who has done significant research in the dry lakes of Antarctica. Boltzmann was a brilliant physicist and teacher, a pioneer in the study of entropy. He was an early champion for the atomic model of matter in the 19th century, to the derision of many of his peers. Ironically, he committed suicide at almost the same time as Einstein was doing his pioneering work on brownian motion. This work, unknown to Bolztmann, provided persuasive evidence for the atomic model by demonstrating the existence of tiny units of matter, so small they are invisible and yet energetic enough that they cause macroscopic dust particles to move randomly in water. The author notes that Boltzmann died in Duino, the same city where Rilke wrote his Duino Elegies, brilliant poetry of profound melancholy. Boltzmann and Rilke were kindred spirits in the sense that both suffered profound depression, and were tortured by self-doubt. More importantly, the two shared the supreme gift of being able to take experience and use their respective media of mathematics and written language creatively to express unique truths.

This short work is not intended to do justice to the arduous task of skeptical inquiry and the continuing cycle of intellectual labor turning observation into theory, theory into prediction, prediction into experiment that supports or falsifies the theory. What this book does is illuminate the spark that drives scientists, and it makes clear that science comes from the work of real people who are so moved by the mystery and magic of their experience that they will walk through the fire of scorn, self-doubt and in the case of Galileo, the very real fear of torture, to seek and speak truth.

Boltzmann’s entropy formula S= k*log(W) is carved onto his tomb. His work on entropy describes the relationship between what one can observe such as the temperature of a volume of gas and a statistical description of the more or less random states of tiny units such as the motion of the constituent molecules. His work on entropy metaphorically focuses our attention on the role of chance in our every endeavor. Chance encounters with scientists during the author’s travels as a younger man lead to opportunities such as the chance to work in Antarctica. The capacity for poetic wonder at the splendors of nature fueled his scientific career. The message is that what comes to everyone does so more or less by happenstance, but some find mystery and beauty in these chance encounters. Creative souls, the scientists and poets, are then inspired for a lifetime of expression.

Boltzmann’s Tomb is a scientific travelogue celebrating a number of pilgrimages to the places where great science was made. As we follow the author on his travels, we visit the Vienna of Boltzmann and so many others in science and the arts. We spend time in Galileo’s Florence, hometown of the Renaissance. Cambridge was home to Isaac Newton and Watson and Crick of DNA fame. We visit Prague where Copernicus and Kepler created the basis for modern astronomy and laid the groundwork for Newton’s description of gravity. Along the way we see the scientists as human beings, creatures of their place and time and inspired to transcend their beginnings by creating glorious structures of thought to explain the mysteries of the universe. We come to appreciate the passionate and poetic wonder that informs much of great science. Do yourself a favor and put this book on your shelf of inspirational literature.

AMAZON READER RATING: from 1 readers
PUBLISHER: Bellevue Literary Press (June 14, 2011)
REVIEWER: Bill Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Bill Green
EXTRAS: Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

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]]> http://bookreview.mostlyfiction.com/2011/boltzmanns-tomb-by-bill-green/feed/ 0 THE DROP by Michael Connelly http://bookreview.mostlyfiction.com/2011/the-drop-by-michael-connelly/ http://bookreview.mostlyfiction.com/2011/the-drop-by-michael-connelly/#comments Sat, 17 Dec 2011 15:00:25 +0000 Judi Clark http://bookreview.mostlyfiction.com/?p=22185 Book Quote:

“He wanted a new case. He needed a new case. He needed to see the look on the killer’s face when he knocked on the door and showed his badge, the embodiment of unexpected justice come calling after so many years.”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowsky  (DEC 17, 2011)

Harry Bosch is the real deal. Michael Connelly’s The Drop is another superb entry in this outstanding series about an L. A. cop who is cynical and battle-weary, yet still committed to doing his job. Harry has had his share of troubles over the years, but now that Maddie, his fifteen-year old daughter, is living with him, he has cleaned up his act. He no longer smokes and avoids overindulging in alcohol. Harry is determined to be there for his little girl as she grows into adulthood. Maddie, who is smart and observant, has announced that she plans to follow in her father’s footsteps. She already has the makings of a good detective; she notices small but significant details, handles a firearm like a pro, and can spot a liar by looking for “tells.” The scenes between Bosch and his precocious teenager sparkle with warmth, humor, and love.

Harry knows that his days working for the LAPD are numbered. He has already “unretired” once, but in order to stay on the job, he will need a special dispensation under a program called DROP (Deferred Retirement Option Plan). Meanwhile, he is working on two investigations. As a member of the Open-Unsolved Unit, he is assigned to a cold case that involves the abduction, rape, and strangulation of nineteen-year-old Lily Price. New DNA evidence has come to light, but the data that it reveals raises more questions than it answers. The chief of police also orders Harry to look into the apparent suicide of forty-six year old George Irving, the son of a former ex-cop turned councilman, Irvin Irving. The outspoken and arrogant councilman loathes Bosch, but respects his ability to ferret out the truth.

The author’s crisp writing, use of jargon (“high jingo” means that higher ups are involved, so watch your step), and colorful depiction of police procedure imbue The Drop with energy, immediacy, and realism. The reader observes Harry making some tough decisions. Should he pull in a possible perp for questioning or first try to gather more evidence? Should he surreptitiously search a suspect’s home before obtaining a search warrant? How should Bosch deal with the brass, the media, and his skittish partner, David Chu? When a new woman enters his life, Harry is attracted to her, but is the relationship worth pursuing

Connelly juggles his plot brilliantly while he keeps us guessing about the outcome. Although Bosch can be brusque, tactless, and dismissive, he is willing to put his reputation on the line and is unafraid to make powerful enemies in his obsessive pursuit of justice. At times, Harry worries that he is starting to lose his edge. He needn’t be concerned, since he still has the expertise to read a crime scene, interview witnesses, and follow all of the clues to their logical conclusion. Even the way that Bosch assembles his “murder books” testifies to his tireless dedication to catching predators. If Harry’s performance in The Drop is any indication, he still has what it takes to put the bad guys away.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 324 readers
PUBLISHER: Little, Brown and Company; First Edition edition (November 28, 2011)
REVIEWER: Eleanor Bukowsky
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Michael Connelly
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Harry Bosch reviews:

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* Terry McCaleb is in these novels
** Harry Bosch is in these novels
*** The Poet is in these novels.
****Mickey Haller is in this novel

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]]> http://bookreview.mostlyfiction.com/2011/the-drop-by-michael-connelly/feed/ 0 A STUDENT OF WEATHER by Elizabeth Hay http://bookreview.mostlyfiction.com/2011/a-student-of-weather-by-elizabeth-hay/ http://bookreview.mostlyfiction.com/2011/a-student-of-weather-by-elizabeth-hay/#comments Fri, 16 Dec 2011 02:18:29 +0000 Judi Clark http://bookreview.mostlyfiction.com/?p=19604 Book Quote:

“He nudged his chair close and studied the warm little hand. He smelled of sweat, peppermint, tobacco, old coffee. Despite his accent he wasn’t hard to understand – he talked so slowly and so carefully. She would have a long life, he said. She would have one child… You have special talents, he told her. People don’t realize.” 

Book Review:

Review by Friederike Knabe  DEC 15, 2011)

… stated the “tiny old man,” one of the many transient visitors to the Hardy farm in the small village of Willow Bend while reading eight-year-old Norma Joyce’s palm.

Canadian author, Elizabeth Hay, centers her superb, enchanting and deeply moving novel around Norma Joyce and sister Lucinda, her senior by nine years. Set against the beautifully evoked natural environments of Saskatchewan and Ontario, and spanning over more than thirty years, the author explores in sometimes subtle, sometimes defter, ways the sisters’ dissimilar characters. One is an “ugly duckling,” the other a beauty; one is rebellious and lazy, the other kind, efficient and unassuming… In a way, their characters mirror what are also suggested to be traditional features of inhabitants living with and in these two contrasting landscapes: on the one hand the farmers in Saskatchewan, patient and often fatalistic in their exposure to the vagaries of the weather and the hopes and destructions that those can bring, on the other the Ontarians, assumed to have a much easier life and, to top it off: they grow apples… A rare delicacy for the farmers out west. Hay wonderfully integrates the theme of the apple – the symbol of seduction as well as health!

Hay’s novel is as much an engaging portrait of the quirky Norma Joyce as it is a delicately woven family drama, beginning in the harsh “dustbowl” years of the 1930s. Still, Hay gives us much more than that: her exquisite writing shines when she paints in richly modulated prose, rather than with the brush, a deeply felt love poem to nature: its constantly varying beauty in response to a weather that seem to toy with it as in a never-ending dance.

While Lucinda runs the household on the farm with efficiency and dedication under the admiring eye of their widowed father, Norma Joyce succeeds in daily disappearing acts to avoid taking her place as a dutiful daughter. Into their routine lives enters, one day, and seemingly from nowhere, Maurice Dove, attractive, knowledgeable and entertaining, a student of weather patterns, Prairie grasses and much more… Ontario meets Saskatchewan with unforeseeable consequences…

Norma Joyce has always been a child of nature through and through: “She had her own memory of grasses. Five years old and lying on her back in the long grass behind the barn, the June sun beating down from a cloudless sky until warmth of another kind pulsed through her in waves [...] she remembers every name of every plant.” Now, at eight, she has found in Maurice the ideal teacher and she turns into the “perfect student.” Her small hand reaches out to claim him… He, while enchanted with Lucinda, had been “taken aback by [Norma Joyce's] ugliness, a word he modified to homeliness the next morning [...] then at breakfast he thought her merely strange, and now, interesting.”

Hay is too fine and imaginative a writer to let the story develop predictably. There will be many twists and turns with the family moving to Ottawa and Norma Joyce even further away to New York. At every turn, Hay builds an environment in which human beings interact with the natural surroundings they are placed into. Her description of the Ottawa neighbourhood is intimate and real; New York has its own attractions and disappointments. As Norma Joyce grows up, she feels forced into a difficult journey, that, she later realizes has been an essential phase for her to gain confidence in herself and to discover “her special talents” as the old man had predicted: “Her life would stop, then it would start again…”.

As a reader, I was totally engaged with Hay’s exploration of Norma Joyce’s maturing that teaches her, among many other lessons, to let go while allowing herself to also accept new experiences into her life. Her life-long connection to the prairies sustains her at a deep level, her community in Ottawa helps her to find new avenues to her inner soul. At a different level, Hay plays with references to Thomas Hardy, to established naturalists to underline the importance of landscape and our traditional connection to it. She evokes images that remind us of fairy tales, such as the drop of bright red blood on the white pillow or Norma’s ability to pre-sense events happening many miles away. For me they form part of a richly created background to what is a very authentic and meaningful account of one young woman’s road to herself, an extraordinary achievement for a first novel. A Student of Weather collected several awards and, deservedly, was a finalist for the prestigious Canadian Giller Prize in 2000.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-5from 31 readers
PUBLISHER: Counterpoint (January 2, 2002)
REVIEWER: Friederike Knabe
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Elizabeth Hay
EXTRAS: Reading Guide
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

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]]> http://bookreview.mostlyfiction.com/2011/a-student-of-weather-by-elizabeth-hay/feed/ 0 QUEEN OF AMERICA by Luis Alberto Urrea http://bookreview.mostlyfiction.com/2011/queen-of-america-by-luis-alberto-urrea/ http://bookreview.mostlyfiction.com/2011/queen-of-america-by-luis-alberto-urrea/#comments Wed, 30 Nov 2011 14:11:36 +0000 Judi Clark http://bookreview.mostlyfiction.com/?p=22142 Book Quote:

“Who is more of an outlaw than a saint?”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn (NOV 30, 2011)

Like its predecessor, The Hummingbird’s Daughter, Urrea’s sequel, Queen of America is a panoramic, picaresque, sprawling, sweeping novel that dazzles us with epic destiny, perilous twists, and high romance, set primarily in Industrial era America (and six years in the author’s undertaking). Based on Urrea’s real ancestry, this historical fiction combines family folklore with magical realism and Western adventure at the turn of the twentieth century.

It starts where the first book left off, and can be read as a stand-alone, according to the marketing and product description. However, I stoutly recommend that readers read The Hummingbird’s Daughter first. The two stories are part of a heroic saga; you shouldn’t cut off the head to apprehend the tale. You cannot capture the incipient magic and allure of Teresita without her roots in the first (and better) book. Urrea spent twenty years researching his family history, border unrest, guerrilla violence in the post-Civil War southwest, and revolution, so poignantly rendered in his first masterpiece.

At the center of both stories is the enigmatic and beautiful heroine, Teresita Urrea, named the Saint of Cabora by her legion of followers, when at sixteen, she was sexually assaulted, died, and subsequently rose from her coffin at her wake. She was denounced as a heretic by the Catholic Church but declared a saint by her devotees. An accomplished horsewoman and botanical shaman, she discovered the miracle of healing with her hands. Vanquishing pain and suffering with touch, Teresita has embodied her role with dignity, and sometimes despair, as she sacrifices her personal desires in order to combat social injustice and conquer disease.

Solitude is impossible, as she is followed by humble pilgrims and pursued by the Mexican government, greedy henchmen and dangerous lackeys. In the sequel, Teresita continues her journey and evolvement, with the primary question and theme of her life– whether a saint can find her life’s purpose and also fall in love. Along the way, she is entangled in conflicts between celebrity and simplicity, material wealth and spiritual wellbeing. Although she is idolized as a saint, she is, alas, human, with human emotions—such as lust, love, sorrow, pain, temptation. She makes mistakes, and is periodically confused and conflicted. It’s hard to be a saint when you’re made of flesh and blood and hormones.

After the Tomochic rebellion in Mexico in 1891, Teresita Urrea flees to the United States with her aging but ripe swashbuckler father, Tomas, known as Sky Catcher. She experiences romantic and cataclysmic love with an Indian mystic and warrior, eventually causing a serious breach with her father. When events spiral out of control, Teresita’s journey takes her further and further from her homeland.

From Tucson, to El Paso, St. Louis, San Francisco, New York, and places everywhere in-between, this sequel is a journey from poverty and pestilence to an unknown, glittering, bustling, and modern America, a place that offers new opportunities for immigrant Teresita—-prosperity, new romance, and celebrity. She is hunted by assassins, who claim she is the spiritual leader of the Mexican Revolution; harassed by profiteers, who want to arrange a consortium to exploit her healing abilities; and haunted daily by pilgrims everywhere, begging her to cure their ills.

Dickensian in scope, this ribald novel is peopled by the humble and the haughty, the meek and the mighty—pilgrims, prostitutes, yeoman, warriors, cowboys, vaqueros, royalty, revolutionaries, financial exploiters, gamblers, tycoons, corrupt politicians, drunks, rogues, and outlaws. It’s gritty, bawdy, tender, and tumultuous, and sometimes turgid, as it meanders down several long and winding paths. When it stalls at intervals, patience and the love of prose and colorful character will keep the reader fastened. This will appeal to fans of high adventure, mixed with folktale wisdom and mystical fantasy. Big, vast skies and rough and tumble travel, this is an unforgettable story of love, purpose, and redemption.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-5from 4 readers
PUBLISHER: Little, Brown and Company; Import edition (November 28, 2011)
REVIEWER: Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Luis Alberto Urrea
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

 

Bibliography:

The Border Trilogy Memoirs:

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]]> http://bookreview.mostlyfiction.com/2011/queen-of-america-by-luis-alberto-urrea/feed/ 0 THE THIRD REICH by Roberto Bolano http://bookreview.mostlyfiction.com/2011/the-third-reich-by-roberto-bolano/ http://bookreview.mostlyfiction.com/2011/the-third-reich-by-roberto-bolano/#comments Tue, 22 Nov 2011 13:46:53 +0000 Judi Clark http://bookreview.mostlyfiction.com/?p=22086 Book Quote:

“And until you have possessed
dying and rebirth,
you are but a sullen guest
on the gloomy earth.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  (NOV 22, 2011)

Bolaño cites this quotation from Goethe (also given in German) towards the end of this early but posthumously discovered novel. It is as good a key as any to what the book may be about. The protagonist, Udo Berger, a German in his mid-twenties, is literally a guest — in a hotel. He is taking a late summer vacation with his girlfriend Ingeborg in a beach hotel on the Costa Brava where he used to come with his family as a child. Together with another German couple, Hanna and Charly, they engage in the usual occupations: swimming, sunbathing, eating, drinking (a lot), and making love. But shadows hang over this idyll. They become involved with a group of slightly sinister local men, called The Wolf, The Lamb, and El Quemado (the burnt one), a hideously-burned South American immigrant who hires out pedal boats on the beach. Their contentment is marred by small acts of offstage violence, and by an unexpected death that touches them more directly. Udo will stay on until the hotel is about to close for the season, a change in atmosphere that is summed up by Bolaño in itchily discordant images:

“The regular muted sound of the elevator has been replaced by scratching and races behind the plaster of the walls. The wind that every night shakes the window frame and hinges is more powerful. The faucets of the sink squeak and shudder before releasing water. Even the smell of the hallways, perfumed with artificial lavender, breaks down more quickly and turns into a pestilent stink that causes terrible coughing fits late at night.”

The biggest shadow of all is that cast by the title, The Third Reich. We learn early on that it is the name of a war game played with counters on a stylized map. The war that the game replays is a purely military operation of armies, deployments, and supply lines; the text has no hint of Nazi ideology or the Holocaust. Yet those associations are inevitably in the mind of the reader, who waits for some at least symbolic equivalent to surface, for the dream holiday to become a nightmare. And Bolaño, who is a master at generating angst from a meticulous compilation of detail, makes a fine start to building the tension here. Udo is the German national champion of war-gaming. Like one of those solipsistic characters out of Ishiguro, he is obsessed in his hermetic world, working out variants of the games, publishing them in obscure magazines, corresponding with gamers in other countries. Alone of the German quartet, he remains pale while the others develop suntans, since he prefers working in his room to lounging on the beach. There is a danger in him, a potential for mental instability, at least as great as any threat posed by the low-life characters with whom the four associate.

This is a beautifully produced book with an evocatively surreal cover and a fluid translation by Natasha Wimmer. I leaped into it the moment it arrived and truly wanted to like it. But I have to say that, for all the fascinating hints of ideas he would develop in The Savage Detectives and especially in 2666, this is not vintage Bolaño. It seemed to be all wind-up and no punch. As so often with Bolaño, there is a surreal element competing with the meticulous realism, but here I felt they canceled each other out rather than reinforcing. Udo, of course, lives much of his time in a totally irreal world, “essentially ghosts of a ghostly General Staff, forever performing military exercises on game boards.” Ingeborg, his girlfriend, is forever reading a mystery featuring the detective Florian Linden, but although reportedly near the end she never reaches it. A vacation involving so great a consumption of alcohol is in itself somewhat unreal, and Udo’s imagination verges increasingly on paranoia. Yet while nightmares, in the sense of actual dreams, play a larger and larger part in the story, the nightmare fails to materialize in reality; the book ends in distinct anticlimax.

All the same, I do see the point of the Goethe quotation. “Dying and rebirth” are certainly among the ideas in play, and Udo is a different person at the end. The novel makes a fascinating addendum for existing fans of Bolaño’s work. But though it is an easy read, even lighthearted at times, I would not recommend it as an introduction for those who do not know the author. For them, and especially for those leery of tackling the vast scale of his major works, I would suggest the novella By Night in Chile, whose compact power is merely hinted at here.

AMAZON READER RATING: from 15 readers
PUBLISHER: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (November 22, 2011)
REVIEWER: Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Wikipedia page on Roberto Bolano
EXTRAS: Excerpt
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]]> http://bookreview.mostlyfiction.com/2011/the-third-reich-by-roberto-bolano/feed/ 0 ASSUMPTION by Percival Everett http://bookreview.mostlyfiction.com/2011/assumption-by-percival-everett/ http://bookreview.mostlyfiction.com/2011/assumption-by-percival-everett/#comments Fri, 18 Nov 2011 02:32:31 +0000 Judi Clark http://bookreview.mostlyfiction.com/?p=22091 Book Quote:

“I’ll tell you what this is, it’s two gallons of shit in a one-gallon bucket.”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte  (NOV 17, 2011)

The hardscrabble desert land of New Mexico is the perfect setting for Percival Everett’s new novel, Assumption, mainly because it mirrors the protagonist’s character incredibly well. Ogden Walker is a deputy in the sheriff’s office in the small town of Plata, where he serves after a brief stint in the army. Plata might be where mom Eva Walker lives but Ogden finds her presence not enough of a comfort to overcome his unease with his mixed African American heritage (he is biracial) or his general malaise with what seems to be a dead-end career. He finds it hard to be content hunting for the small fish even if a colleague tells him, “A big fish is fun, I suppose, but so are small ones sometimes. Depends on the water. If I catch a ten-incher in a creek that’s two foot wide, that’s a big fish.”

One day, when an old lady in town is shot dead in her own home, Walker is not sure quite where to begin. His investigations eventually lead him to discover that she might have been part of some hate groups — it’s a hard paradox to serve the very people who might wish you harm. Before this murder is completely resolved, there’s more trouble. The body count rises again, this time through a seemingly unrelated murder on the other end of town.

This incident has Walker chasing down prostitutes in seedy sections of Denver. This mystery snowballs into a third one where a fellow law enforcement agent is shot and again, nobody knows what happened and how. As Everett goes about putting all the pieces together, the writing increasingly reaches a feverish pitch and one wonders if anybody is keeping count as the body count ratchets up easily and steadily. “Warren moved on to the next structure, knowing nothing more than that he was confused,” writes Everett of Ogden’s coworker, Warren Fragua, “More so with each piece of this puzzle, if in fact these were pieces, if in fact this was a puzzle.” That same disorienting sensation works itself on to the pages of this fast-paced novel.

Assumption is full of razor-sharp dialog and Everett does a wonderful job of capturing the gritty landscape but the disparate story threads and sudden detours in the action occasionally make the book trying.

With the twists and turns in the story, the moral of the novel might well be to assume nothing. But it sure feels like Everett goes to great lengths just to make that point. After a while the story is not so much genre-bending as genre-defying. Readers who like their suspense stories resolved well will find Everett’s latest novel frustrating. Even the surprise ending might not help redeem matters in such a case.

On the other hand, readers who love the chase as much as the outcome, will find Assumption entertaining and a fun ride. When one of the characters in the novel points out that the whole mess is “hinky as hell,” they will only be too happy. After all, when it comes to murder mysteries, “hinky” is good.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 1 readers
PUBLISHER: Graywolf Press (October 25, 2011)
REVIEWER: Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Wikipedia page on Percival Everett
EXTRAS: Excerpt
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]]> http://bookreview.mostlyfiction.com/2011/assumption-by-percival-everett/feed/ 0 THE MARRIAGE PLOT by Jeffrey Eugenides http://bookreview.mostlyfiction.com/2011/the-marriage-plot-by-jeffrey-eugenides/ http://bookreview.mostlyfiction.com/2011/the-marriage-plot-by-jeffrey-eugenides/#comments Thu, 17 Nov 2011 01:32:53 +0000 Judi Clark http://bookreview.mostlyfiction.com/?p=22088 Book Quote:

“In the days when success in life had depended on marriage, and marriage had depended on money, novelists had a subject to write about. The great epics sang of war, the novels of marriage. Sexual equality, good for women, had been bad for the novel. And divorce had undone it completely…Where could you find the marriage plot nowadays?”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (NOV 16, 2011)

“Reader, I married him.”

What sensitive reader hasn’t thrilled to the last lines of the novel Jane Eyre, when the mousy and unprepossessing girl triumphantly returns to windswept Thornfield as a mature woman, marrying her one-time employer and great love, Mr. Rochester?

That era of these great wrenching love stories is now dead and gone. Or is it? Can these time-honored stories be rewritten for our current age, adapting to the accepted forces of sexual freedom and feminism? That’s the main focus of Jeffrey Eugenides’ new novel and the theme shows up early on. He writes about his key character: “Madeleine’s love troubles had begun at a time when the French theory she was reading deconstructed the very notion of love.”

You’d expect the author of the ground-breaking Virgin Suicides – a beautifully-rendered mythology about the suicides of five secluded sisters as seen through the eyes of neighborhood boys – and Middlesex, the exhilarating Pulitzer Prize winning multi-generational saga focusing on a hermaphrodite – to bring a fresh energy to the topic. And indeed, Mr. Eugenides does.

The” marriage plot” is a term used to categorize a storyline centered on the courtship rituals between a man and a woman and the potential obstacles they face on the way to the nuptial bed. It often involves a triangle – typically, the woman and man who are fated to be together and a strong rival for the woman’s attention.

So it is here. Madeline Hanna – the center of this new marriage plot — is a privileged Brown University student, a young English major whose books range from the complete Modern Library set of Henry James to “a lot of Dickens, a smidgen of Trollope, along with good helpings of Austen, George Eliot, and the redoubtable Bronte sisters.” Her brain is tantalized by her readings of deconstructions like Roland Barthes in her Semiotics 211; her heart, though, is firmly tethered to the literature of a century or two past. The other two sides of the love triangle are composed of Leonard Bankhead, a charismatic, sexually charged, intellectual, and intense college Darwinist, and Mitchell Grammaticus, the spiritually inclined seeker who has been delving into various religious mythologies including Christian mysticism.

But – Eugenides being Eugenides – someone who does not shy from complex characters – he adds a twist. Leonard is not only tall, dark and brooding (he wears a leather jacket, chews tobacco and is uncontrollably moody. Think: David Wallace Foster), he is also bipolar. What follows is one of the most breathtaking descriptions of this mental condition that this reader has ever read:

“As Leonard strode along, thoughts stacked up in his head like air traffic over Logan Airport to the northwest. There were one or two jumbo jets full of Big Ideas, a fleet of 707s laden with the cargo of sensual impressions (the color of the sky, the smell of the sea), as well as Learjets carrying rich solitary impulses that wished to travel incognito. All these planes requested permission to land simultaneously. Leonard radioed the aircraft, telling some to keep circling while ordering others to divert to another location entirely. The stream of traffic was never-ending…”

How do you carry on a relationship with someone who is hostage to his emotions and at the mercy of Lithium, which leaves him dulled and somnambulant, plump and often impotent…yet often magnetic? Indeed, there are times the reader will question exactly what the attraction is and why Madeleine succumbs to it. But wait – in the wings is the man who still carries the torch and who is currently overseas working out the big questions: the meaning of life, the existence of God, and the true nature of love.

There are those who will consider the plot to be vaguely misogynistic. After all, Madeleine is the “prize” between two very determined men; she is hardly “I am woman, hear me roar.” Rather, “it turned out that Madeleine had a madwoman in the attic: it was her six-foot-three boyfriend.” Mr. Eugenides is not trying to make politically-correct statements; rather, he is working within the confines of the traditional marriage plot, with wisps and tendrils of everything from Jane Eyre to Anna Karenina. And he does so smartly. He deconstructs not only the deconstruction of the marriage plot, but answers the question about why we still rejoice in this timeworn style. And he does it with page-turning fervor to show how reading about love affects the ways we fall in love.

With devastating wit and a nod to intellectual and academic influences, Jeffrey Eugenides creates a fresh new way to approach the predictable marriage plot, revealing its relevance in today’s world. It is an achievement.

AMAZON READER RATING: from 392 readers
PUBLISHER: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (October 11, 2011)
REVIEWER: Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Wikipedia page on Jeffrey Eugenides
EXTRAS: Reading Guide and Excerpt
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]]> http://bookreview.mostlyfiction.com/2011/the-marriage-plot-by-jeffrey-eugenides/feed/ 0 ED KING by David Guterson http://bookreview.mostlyfiction.com/2011/ed-king-by-david-guterson/ http://bookreview.mostlyfiction.com/2011/ed-king-by-david-guterson/#comments Sun, 13 Nov 2011 16:14:35 +0000 Judi Clark http://bookreview.mostlyfiction.com/?p=22095 Book Quote:

“In 1962, Walter Cousins made the biggest mistake of his life: he slept with the au pair for a month. She was an English exchange student named Diane Burroughs, and he was an actuary from Piersall-Crane, Inc., whose wife, that summer, had suffered a nervous breakdown.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (NOV 13, 2011)

Ed King had me mesmerized from the first page and did not let up throughout the book. It is a contemporary retelling of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex set in the American northwest. The protagonist’s name, Ed King, means Oedipus Rex. Ed is short for Oedipus and Rex means “king” in Greek. Ed’s middle name is Aaron and one could read into this, “Ed, A King.” There is no real subtlety to the retelling. The characters change but the story remains the same. Ed kills his father and marries his mother. It is a Greek tragedy of great proportions and strength, hubris and loss.

The story opens with Walter Cousins, an actuary, temporarily left without childcare while his wife is hospitalized with a nervous breakdown. The time is the 1960′s. Ed hires a fifteen year-old British au pair, Diane, and begins the biggest mistake of his life – sleeping with her. She becomes pregnant and they agree to have the baby put up for adoption. Instead, she leaves the infant on a front porch in a prosperous neighborhood. The child is eventually adopted by an upper middle class Jewish family and raised with much love.

Diane blackmails Walter for $500 per month in perpetuity, telling him that she kept the child and needs the money for childcare. The character of Diane is well wrought. She is interesting, beguiling, and sly to the max. Over and over she rises to the top only to be brought down by her own hubris.

Ed goes to Stanford where he is a math whiz. After graduation, with some start-up money from his family, he begins a company that is called Pythia and it is reminiscent of Microsoft, as is his character similar to Bill Gates. Ed also is similar to Steve Jobs in that he was adopted and has started up one of the most successful businesses on the planet.

Pythia becomes the largest data search company in the world and Ed is one of the richest men in the world. He has a thing for older women and, wouldn’t you know, somehow he finds and ends up with Diane, sixteen years his senior but still very attractive. His family is a bit troubled by the age difference but learn to accept the marriage.

During his teen years, Ed is a bit of a renegade. He likes to drive fast cars, has little use for adult wisdom and goes his own way. One day he is driving with his girlfriend and a man in a BMW gives him the finger. Ed is incensed and is determined to get the best of this stranger. Ed ends up driving him off the road and this man is killed. His name is Walter Cousins. This episode is an existential moment in Ed’s development. He does not know who Walter is, but the thought of having killed someone else makes him feel psychically ill. He ruminates on it and can not get it off his mind. He gets rid of his car and tries to move on with his life. His girlfriend can’t understand why all of this bothers Ed. No one saw the accident happen and, as far as the law is concerned, Ed is off – free and clear. However, he is punished by himself.

The character of Ed does not have the same depth as Diane. Aside from the existential dilemma posed by killing Walter, Ed has it easy. He’s brilliant and arrogant, filled with hubris. Diane is not only interesting and filled with adventure, but each chapter about her brings on new information that just whets the appetite for more. Ed is much more bland. His story is told from his birth to his death with adequacy but lacks the component of thrill that accompanies Diane’s life.

Guterson is a masterful writer. He knows how to rein the reader in and just hold him captive. There was not one page in this book that bored me. I kept reading with interest and delight as the novel progressed. I highly admire Guterson’s way of redoing a classic in contemporary time and still retaining all the aspects of the original that made it such a classic tragedy in the first place. This is one of my top ten books read this year, without a doubt.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-3-5from 13 readers
PUBLISHER: Knopf (October 18, 2011)
REVIEWER: Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Wikipedia page on David Guterson
EXTRAS: Reading Guide and Excerpt
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