Category Archives: Books

Helen Simonson’s Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand is already fading a bit from memory, since immediately after it I read Mrs. Ames by E.F. Benson, and the two books have some major similarities. They are both about English village life, they are both examples of the novel of manners, and they are both extremely readable with charming and gently ironic narrative voices. More on Mrs. Ames later.

Simonson’s book tells the story of Major Pettigrew and his friendship with Mrs. Ali, a Pakistani woman who owns a shop in town. It’s the type of small town society we’ve all heard about if not lived in ourselves, where everybody knows everybody’s business and the life of the town revolves around social events and gossip. Being a novel of English small town life, it’s very much about class and also about race. As Major Pettigrew and Mrs. Ali begin to spend more time together, the gossip begins and some ugly attitudes emerge.

The novel is also about family dynamics. As the story begins, Major Pettigrew has just lost his brother Bertie; once the funeral is over, it’s time to start thinking about what will happen to Bertie’s antique Churchill gun, one of a matched pair, the other of which the Major owns. It’s no surprise to learn that while the Major’s father clearly wished the pair to be reunited upon the death of one of the brothers, the new widow is reluctant to give the valuable weapon up. Conflicts ensue.

The story is a pleasurable one; Simonson handles the romance between the Major and Mrs. Ali very well, and she brings her characters together in entertainingly dramatic scenes. What I enjoyed most, though, is the narrative voice. Simonson is excellent at creating an understated, quiet, but nonetheless very funny satirical tone. The Major’s son Roger is particularly ridiculous: he is obsessed with appearances and social climbing and he and his American girlfriend (yes, the Americans in this book are the horrible clueless Americans of the stereotype) are self-absorbed, rude, and generally awful. For example, in this passage Roger asks the Major whether he will vouch for him as he and his girlfriend try to rent a cottage. Roger says:

“The issue is the widowed Mrs. Augerspier. She wants to sell the cottage to the ‘right’ people. I need you to come with us and be your most distinguished and charming self.”

“So you would like me to come and kiss the hand of the poor widow like some continental gigolo until she is confused into accepting your meager offer for a property that probably represents her entire nest egg?” asked the Major.

“Exactly,” said Roger. “Is Thursday at two good for you?”

Simonson is also particularly good at handling the issues of race and colonialism that underlie the story. The Major is a little out of his depth as he meets Mrs. Ali’s extended family, but his politeness gets him through his encounters with an unfamiliar culture. Mrs. Ali shows grace and patience as she deals with the clueless and rude townspeople who don’t quite manage to acknowledge her as a real person with thoughts and feelings. Simonson deals with the colonialism issue partly by having the Major and Mrs. Ali read Kipling together. As they discuss him, they delicately touch on the colonial legacy that shaped both of their lives:

“I used to consider myself a bit of a Kipling enthusiast,” said the Major. “I’m afraid he’s rather an unfashionable choice these days, isn’t he?”

“You mean not popular among us, the angry former natives”? she asked with an arch of one eyebrow.

“No, of course not …” said the Major, not feeling equipped to respond to such a direct remark …

“I did give [Kipling] up for many decades,” she said. “He seemed such a part of those who refuse to reconsider what the Empire meant. But as I get older, I find myself insisting on my right to be philosophically sloppy. It’s so hard to maintain that rigor of youth, isn’t it?”

“I applaud your logic,” said the Major, swallowing any urge to defend the Empire his father had proudly served. “Personally, I have no patience with all this analyzing of writers’ politics. “The man wrote some thirty-five books — let them analyze the prose.”

The Major and Mrs. Ali are such charming characters. I’ll confess that I got some of the minor ones confused now and then, but the Major and Mrs. Ali are wonderful company to keep while reading a novel. There is much to admire and enjoy in this book, particularly if a quiet love story and a book about small town conflicts appeals to you. Simonson does an excellent job with her material.

Frank Delaney’s novel The Matchmaker of Kenmare didn’t strike me as a particularly good book, although I found myself absorbed in the last 100 pages or so wanting to know how things turned out. But I did enjoy it at times because it’s set in the part of Ireland Hobgoblin and I will be traveling to this May (we were supposed to go last year but the trip got canceled — this year it’s on — yay!). We will be staying in Dingle, which gets a mention now and then, and much of the action takes place on the coast and in the countryside near our little town. It was fun to read about the place we will be staying.

As for the novel itself, it’s set during World War II and tells the story of Ben McCarthy, a folklorist who travels around the country collecting stories and is trying to recover from a broken heart after his wife mysteriously disappeared, and Kate Begley, the matchmaker of the title, a young woman learning how to ply the matchmaking trade from her grandmother. The two meet and strike up a somewhat combative friendship. They meet the American intelligence officer Charles Miller, and Kate falls in love. She also starts working for Miller, or so Ben surmises as he watches them having mysteriously intense conversations. Kate’s involvement with Charles takes them first to London, and later into France, Belgium, and Germany. Even though the war is winding down and Ben and Kate are partly protected by Ireland’s neutral stance in the war, they find themselves in way over their heads.

It was interesting to read about how the war affected Ireland; it remained neutral throughout, but was still in danger as both England and Germany saw it as important strategically. The characters have to figure out what they think about both sides and how they can best protect themselves. The work the two characters do when they aren’t off on their war escapades is also interesting, both the stories Ben hears and records and the couples Kate brings together.

The problem with the book, I thought, lies in the way the first person narrator, Ben, tells the story. He is writing to his children from the vantage point of old age, filling them in on his life story, and he constantly hints in ominous tones about the very exciting things that are about to happen. We get lots of comments of the “little did I know …” variety:

That was the moment at which two strangers walked into the dance hall — and that was the beginning of so many things, and the continuation of so many things, and the end of so many things….

A couple of hours later, when the afternoon had grown quieter, the rest of our lives began. We all heard the engine, we all listened from our respective chairs, and I swear to this day that I knew who had arrived — the two young American soldiers from last night. A third man rode with them, and he was the world changer….

Indeed I can say now that however rambling they may seem, my Digressions will serve a purpose.

I think you get the idea. The book would have worked better if told in a more direct manner, without all the editorializing from the older version of Ben. I’m fine with the set-up of a character telling his children the story of the most exciting part of his life, but it needs to be done in a much smoother way and it needs to keep the reader more consistently immersed in the action.

The book does have its pleasures — as you can imagine, the love triangle that develops between Kate, Ben, and Charles is consistently interesting — but, unfortunately, the quality of the writing kept interfering with the fun.

I’m afraid I have another negative review to write, and in this case, it’s a book I couldn’t finish. I made it about 160 pages out of over 400 into Carlos Fuentes’s new novel Destiny and Desire (which I won from Goodreads) and decided to call it quits. I’m not one to abandon books often or easily, and I really wanted to finish this one, to see if the pace would ever pick up or if my interest would sharpen, but during the last ten or twenty pages, I was beginning to positively hate the book, so it was time to stop.

This is another case, like the novel The Illumination I wrote about yesterday, of not liking a book I’ve read only positive reviews of. The New York Times, for one, reviewed it glowingly last week. My problems with it, though, were multiple. Part of it is that the book struck me as very unfriendly toward women. It’s about two young men growing up in Mexico City, attending school, having intense philosophical debates, reading books together (that’s what I read about anyway — the plot was soon to take them in other directions), and all that’s fine, but their friendship as they grow up is more and more built on bonding through degrading women. The women characters were either sex objects or evil, nasty parents and guardians. I didn’t hold out much hope that this would change.

The other problem was that I did not enjoy the writing, which struck me as overblown and ponderous. There were a few too many passages like this one, which comes from the first page; it starts off fine with some nice images, but takes a turn for the worse:

The Pacific really is a tranquil ocean now, as white as a large basin of milk. The waves have warned it that earth is approaching. I try to measure the distance between two waves. Or is it time that separates them, not distance? Answering this question would solve my own mystery. The ocean is undrinkable, but it drinks us. Its softness is a thousand times greater than earth’s. But we hear only the echo, not the voice of the sea. If the sea were to shout, we would all be deaf. And if the sea were to stop, we would all be dead.

Okay, the last two lines are fine, too, but I don’t know how “answering this question would solve my own mystery.” It’s the kind of vague sentence that drives me nuts, and the book was full of similarly vague sentences. The novel is narrated by one of the two main characters, and he’s altogether too satisfied with himself to be enjoyable company.

The novel has an interesting conceit: the first-person narrator is actually dead — he’s a severed head washed up on the beach. We learn he is twenty-seven at his death, so the novel, as far as I can see, is supposed to tell the story of what led to such a gruesome end. I can see that this book is supposed to say something about Mexican society and politics, and I’m sure that if I could have gotten into the story, that would have been interesting. But it’s not for me to find out.

So, clearly, I am not the best reader for this book. I’m curious if others have read Fuentes before and liked any of his books. Are there ones I might like better, particularly short ones? And now that I’ve written such bad things about this book, would anyone like my copy? Such a generous offer! You very well might like it better than I did, though. Just let me know; the first person to express interest gets it.

Reading Kevin Brockmeier’s new novel The Illumination has been an interesting experience for me because I didn’t much like it, and when I took a look at some reviews, I found a bunch of glowing ones and a couple that were negative, so opinion seems to be inconsistent but mostly positive. I didn’t, however, do a very thorough survey, so I don’t really know. But it’s interesting to me to read glowing reviews of a book I didn’t like; it doesn’t make me doubt my feelings about the book, but it does make me wonder … what was going on in other people’s heads. Not that I doubt their experience, either; I just wonder, as I often do, about this whole business of reviewing. Does anybody really know what makes a good book or a bad book?

Anyway, the book is really more a series of linked stories than it is a novel. The are six stories, each with a different main character, and they are united by two things; the first is a book full of love notes from a husband to his wife that gets passed from character to character. We meet the wife in the hospital just as she is about to die from a car crash. In a gesture of sadness and defeat, just before her death she passes the book on to the woman with whom she shares a hospital room. The book contains copies of daily notes the husband had left telling his wife something that he loved about her:

I love the ball you curl into when you wake up in the morning but don’t want to get out from under the covers. I love the last question you ask me before bedtime. I love the way you alphabetize the CDs but arrange the books by height. I love you in your blue winter coat that looks like upholstery fabric.

There are pages and pages of these notes, and together they tell the story of a marriage. The book travels from character to character, getting stained and ripped and losing pages along the way. The book means different things to the various characters, but it makes them all think about what it means to love another person.

The other unifying factor in the book is that all the sudden for no reason anyone knows of, pain becomes visible as light, hence “the illumination.” It’s now possible to see when someone is ill, or if they are suffering from arthritis or kidney stones or scrapes and bruises. The more severe the pain, the brighter the light. This makes a simple walk down the street an entirely different experience. Now, you’re confronted with pain at practically every moment; you can see just how much everyone is suffering, how common it is to live with pain. No one can hide illnesses anymore; your cancer is immediately obvious, as is your migraine.

Brockmeier’s characters are all very different types: there is an author, a young boy who is troubled and refuses to talk, an evangelical missionary, a homeless man, and a photographer. (The illumination is a boon for professional photographers: imagine the amazing photos you could take if people’s pain were visible.) The range of characters and situations is impressive.

In spite of all these interesting things going on, however, I never connected with the book. Perhaps there is simply too much going on. It remained an intellectual exercise for me, and the intellectual exercise wasn’t a particularly satisfying one. Brockmeier is exploring the meaning of pain and suffering, and the narrative occasionally stops to ponder such questions as how pain changes us and what suffering does to our faith in God. I didn’t find that this questioning led anywhere, though, or added up to much.

It would have helped to know in advance that this was basically a collection of linked stories rather than a more traditional novel (generally I prefer not to know much about a book I’m going to read, so I avoid it when I can, but this is an exception — it’s good to know whether you’re going to get a traditional narrative arc or not). But I’m not sure I would have liked it that much more if I had known; there was something a little lifeless and dry about the book that made me reluctant to pick it up again.

But other readers have thought this book is wonderful, so it’s possible that you will too.

I published a review over at Necessary Fiction of Tiphanie Yanique’s collection of stories, How to Escape from a Leper Colony. The review is here. It was a very good collection and I enjoyed reading it and writing about it. Check it out!

My mystery group chose John Le Carre’s 1961 novel Call for the Dead to discuss at our last meeting. It was my first Le Carre novel, and my first spy novel in a long, long time (I may have read one or two when I was a teenager). As we discussed in our group, though, this one isn’t really a spy novel, but more of a mystery/spy hybrid, or actually just a mystery that happens to have some spies in it. Even so, I think I can safely say that spy novels are not my thing, because whenever this book veered off into spy territory, I was alternately confused, irritated, antsy, and bored. There was one point when I got confused about names and wanted to tell Le Carre there is no need to give two different characters the name Dieter.

But there were other moments when I was enjoying myself, particularly when reading about the main character, George Smiley. The opening chapter is an odd one, basically giving us Smiley’s life story in summary form before anything interesting happens at all. No jumping straight into the action for this book. Smiley is a sad sort of protagonist: he’s getting on up in age, looking a little decayed and overweight; he’s in a career he didn’t really want — instead of working in intelligence, he wanted to be a scholar of 17C German literature; and his wife, who affectionately calls him “toad” has just left him. No one was really sure why such a beautiful woman married such a sad sack anyway.

The plot begins when Smiley interviews government worker Samuel Fennan because someone sent an anonymous letter accusing him of harboring communist sympathies. The interview seems amicable, but the next day, it appears that Fennan has committed suicide as a result of the interview. Smiley’s boss accuses him of mishandling things, and Smiley suspects Fennan’s death may not have been a suicide after all. While interviewing Fennan’s wife Elsa, their phone rings. It appears to be a wake-up call, but Elsa Fennan is surprised and lies about it. Smiley knows he needs to figure out why.

It’s Smiley and his relationships that are the most interesting; he strikes up an immediate friendship with a man named Mendel, a police officer helping him work on the case. The two of them have a rapport that’s a pleasure to witness. Smiley also has to confront an old friend-turned-antagonist, Dieter Frey, a man Smiley recruited as a spy in World War II. Dieter’s life has take a very different turn since then, and Smiley has to decide just how much their old relationship matters in a world that has changed dramatically since they first knew each other.

The post-World War II political climate is also interesting (although my patience with this sort of thing is limited); Smiley is a staunch individualist in a world beginning to grapple with the growing power of socialism:

He hated the Press as he hated advertising and television, he hated mass media, the relentless persuasion of the twentieth-century. Everything he admired and loved had been the product of intense individualism. That was why he hated Dieter now, hated what he stood for more strongly than ever before; it was the fabulous impertinence of renouncing the individual in favor of the mass. When had mass philosophies ever brought benefit or wisdom?

As my book group decided, the book captures well the uncertainties of the time when friends turned into enemies, former allies turned into foes. Smiley tries to navigate his way through this tricky maze, but he feels past his prime and out of place. It’s the quintessential outsider position that many, many mystery heroes find themselves in, willingly or not.

I enjoyed Tove Jansson’s novel The Summer Book very much and flipping it through it just now to prepare to write this post, I realized how much I would like to read it again. It’s a book that works quietly, and I think it’s easy to miss some of its effects on a first read. On a basic level the book is about a young girl Sophia and her grandmother, who live, along with Sophia’s father, on an isolated island in Finland. The fact that I noticed but didn’t ponder enough during the first reading is that Sophia’s mother has recently died. This is obviously hugely important, but the book is so quiet about it:

One time in April there was a full moon, and the sea was covered with ice. Sophia woke up and remembered that they had come back to the island and that she had a bed to herself because her mother was dead. The fire was still burning in the stove, and the flames flickered on the ceiling, where the boots were hung up to dry.

And that’s about all the book has to say on the subject, at least directly. But the signs of the mother’s death are everywhere. One of the first things Sophia says to her grandmother is “When are you going to die?” The grandmother says, “Soon. But that is not the least concern of yours.” Except that it is, because the grandmother is the most important figure in Sophia’s life. Her father lives with them doing some kind of work — the introduction to the book tells me it’s sculpture although I didn’t figure this out on my own — but he’s not much of a presence. A little later Sophia finds a skull, and she and her grandmother hang on to it until at the end of the day, they place it in the forest where the evening light catches it. Suddenly, Sophia starts screaming. There’s no explanation about why she does this, but something about the skull must finally have spoken to her about death.

The whole book works in this understated way. There are beautiful descriptions of the island and the ocean, but we learn about the characters almost solely through their words and actions. Sophia and her grandmother spend much of their days playing, and they take this very seriously. With Sophia, this is what one would expect, but the grandmother is just as serious. In one chapter, the grandmother starts carving animals out of driftwood, and Sophia is curious:

“What is it you’re doing?” Sophia asked.

“I’m playing,” Grandmother said.

Sophia crawled into the magic forest and saw everything her grandmother had done.

“Is it an exhibit?” she asked.

But Grandmother said it had nothing to do with sculpture, sculpture was another thing completely. They started gather bones together along the shore.

Later in the book Sophia and her grandmother explore a nearby island where someone has built a new house and posted a “No Trespassing” sign, an act the grandmother believes is rude and ill-bred. So the two of them trespass and end up getting caught: they flee into the woods behind the house but the owner’s dog finds them, and they are forced to show themselves. Fortunately for them, the owner never asks what they were doing there; instead they all behave as though nothing had happened.

It’s an odd scene, but the whole book is like that: it’s as though the family lives in another world entirely where things are slightly different than they are in this one. It’s not a fantasy world, though. The grandmother is aging and has trouble moving about, Sophia is sometimes bored and lonely, occasionally flying into rages, and the father seems the loneliest and most isolated of them all. When other people enter their world, it rarely goes well. Sophia invites a friend, Berenice, to visit the island, but she hates it there, and nobody is sorry when she leaves.

Nature becomes a character in its own right; the descriptions of landscape and plant life are beautiful, but nature can be threatening as well as scenic. There are swarming insects, dangerous gullies, droughts, and storms. One of the most dramatic chapters tells of the family getting stuck away from home during one of the worst storms anyone can remember. Sophia learns about her place in the world: she had asked for a storm and was pleased to have gotten it, until she realizes that people might die. Her grandmother tells her it’s not her fault, but she doesn’t do it in a reassuring way:

“God and you,” Grandmother repeated angrily. “Why should He listen to you, especially, when maybe ten other people prayed for nice weather? And they did, you can count on that.”

“But I prayed first,” Sophia said. “And you can see for yourself they didn’t get nice weather!”

“God,” Grandmother said. “God has so much to do, He doesn’t have time to listen …”

It’s this relationship I loved best about the book: Sophia and her grandmother obviously love each other, but in a way that is honest, real, and sometimes difficult. The grandmother never talks down to or patronizes Sophia, and Sophia uses her relationship with her grandmother to try to understand what has happened to her and to figure out her place in the world. This relationship and the sharp, clear, direct style of Jansson’s writing make the book memorable.