Category Archives: Fiction

I’m entirely uncertain what to think of Kate Atkinson’s Case Histories. There were moments I enjoyed it and moments it left me deeply troubled. The troubling moments were partly aesthetic — there were times, especially near the end, when I found what happened to the characters so unconvincing I laughed — and partly about subject matter I didn’t like. I’m not sure if I can hold this against the book or not, although I would like to.

The subject matter I didn’t like had to do with the way women in the book are constantly under threat and are victims of violence, and the way the men freak out about this to such an extent that one has fantasies of sending his daughter away to a convent. Now, a book that takes up the theme of violence against women sounds interesting to me, but in this case, the picture Atkinson creates is one that is so dark, it felt less like an exploration of the subject and more like a warning — a warning I don’t particularly want to hear.

Okay, but to back up a bit, this book is a mystery, although it’s marketed as literary fiction with mystery elements in it — a ridiculous distinction, really. It has an interesting structure, and Atkinson handles the plotting well. My uncertainties about this book aside, I found the story compelling the whole way through. It starts off with three different “case histories”: descriptions of crimes including kidnapping and murder. Then we are introduced to the detective, Jackson, a private investigator who spends a good deal of his professional time looking for lost cats. As is typical in mystery novels, Jackson has a troubled personal life; his wife has just left him for another man and he tries to spend as much time as he can with his daughter, but he worries he is losing influence over her.

Eventually he finds himself caught up in the three cases. All of the crimes happened years in the past, but in each case something has happened to inspire the survivors to want to look into it again. The police were unable to solve the crime in all three cases and Jackson has serious doubts he will be able to solve them himself, but he has been hired to do a job, and so he tries.

In the course of following Jackson’s investigations, the novel switches point of view frequently, moving from Jackson’s perspective to that of the various survivors. At first this rapid switching from story to story was distracting, but eventually it’s possible to settle into each of the plot lines and begin to enjoy each one. Atkinson does a good job of giving each story its due, and they all feel equally well developed. This doesn’t strike me as an easy feat, and I admire Atkinson for pulling it off, except for those moments where, as I mentioned above, events seemed contrived and I found myself jolted out of the story by some development that didn’t strike me as true.

Jackson is an entertaining detective, but I couldn’t help but feel that he is a rather pale imitation of Rebus from the Ian Rankin novels and of other detectives in other mysteries. The usual elements are there — the troubled love life, the complicated past, the tendency to get beat up regularly, the sardonic view of the world. Jackson spends a lot of time listening to female country music singers — Emmy Lou Harris, Gillian Welch — and this felt like an overly-easy shorthand method of characterization.

So, again, I don’t quite know what to think. At times I was entertained, at times I was irritated, and at times I thought the world Atkinson was painting was a much darker one than what I am willing to accept. I generally don’t have a problem with darkness at all, but here it didn’t seem genuine. It’s not as though all the men are aggressors and the women victims — in fact, one of the cases is about a woman who murders her husband. It’s more that we are reminded again and again that although women can commit acts of violence just as men can, they are still and always uniquely vulnerable and need to be eternally vigilant (and need men to be eternally vigilant in protection of them). That’s not an idea I’m willing to accept.

Charlotte Brontë’s novel Shirley was a bit of a rough read for me. I liked it in places, but in others it felt slow and unfocused. It had an entirely different feel than Jane Eyre and Villette; it was less intense, less gripping. Shirley herself didn’t appear for a good 150 pages (out of the 600 or so pages in my edition), and when she did appear, she livened things up quite a lot, but even afterward the novel’s pacing still felt off. What is most interesting about the novel is the issues it deals with, especially the “woman question” and issues of industrialization, but it’s not a book to read for an exciting plot.

The novel’s opening is odd — and thereby sets the tone for the rest of the novel. It describes three rather foolish curates who are spending the evening drinking and talking and teasing each other. These three characters turn out to be minor, though; they appear later in the novel, but only occasionally. Soon they get interrupted and one of them is sent on a mission that is much closer to the novel’s central plot — a mill owner is under threat of violence because local workers fear that his new machinery, just about to be delivered, will take away their jobs. The curate is supposed to help guard the mill. This opening is typical of how the entire novel tends to work — things happen, but the build-up to the action takes a while and it follows such a winding path that I was left feeling bewildered about what I was supposed to be paying attention to.

In addition to the mill owner, Robert Moore, we soon meet Caroline Helstone, a young woman in love with Robert. When Caroline’s guardian — her uncle — becomes angry with Robert and forbids Caroline to see him anymore, she feels she no longer has any interest in life and her health begins to decline. This sounds kind of pathetic, but Caroline’s life is very lonely and it feels purposeless. Her uncle is distant and unsympathetic, and she longs for the ability men have to get a job and to do some productive work. The only possibility she knows is available for women is to be a governess, and she tries to become one, although everyone around her refuses to help.

It’s at this point that Shirley arrives. She is Caroline’s age, roughly, and is an energetic, lively young heiress. Her presence livens up the neighborhood, and it also livens up the book. She is a welcome and much-needed friend for Caroline, but unfortunately, Caroline suspects that there is a romance about to begin between Shirley and Robert, and she becomes jealous and her health fades even further.

At this point I’ll stop describing the plot; unfortunately the back cover of my edition (Penguin) mentions some details that come up very late in the book and spoil a good bit of what suspense there is. It’s bad enough when an introductory essay gives away the plot, but much worse when the back cover does — because who can resist reading the back cover?

At any rate, part of the interest of the novel comes from how this love triangle will work itself out, and also of great interest is Shirley herself. She is regularly described in masculine terms; “Shirley” was a man’s name, first of all, and she likes to make a joke that she is a gentleman:

Business! Really the word makes me conscious I am indeed no longer a girl, but quite a woman and something more. I am an esquire: Shirley Keeldar, Esquire, ought to be my style and title. They gave me a man’s name; I hold a man’s position: it is enough to inspire me with a touch of manhood … You must choose me for your churchwarden, Mr. Helstone, the next time you elect new ones; they ought to make me a magistrate and a captain of yeomanry: Tony Lumpkin’s mother was a colonel, and his aunt a justice of the peace — why shouldn’t I be?

Caroline is much more retiring and ladylike than Shirley, but the two agree that women’s options in life are woefully limited and they chafe against the male characters who refuse to take them seriously because of their gender.

The other issue the novel takes up is technology and industrialization, and this is largely Robert’s story; he is in debt and is struggling to make his mill profitable enough to clear his name, but there are several obstacles against him, including the threat of violence from Luddite protesters and the fact that England is at war, which is disrupting commerce. Shirley isn’t anti-industrialization; Robert’s struggles are portrayed sympathetically, and the technological changes seem inevitable. What matters, ultimately, is whether Robert’s heart is in the right place; he has some lessons about charity and generosity he needs to learn.

I’m glad I read this novel because I was curious about what it was like, and I’d like to read all the Brontë novels eventually (I’ve read Jane Eyre, Villette, Wuthering Heights, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and now Shirley, which leaves me The Professor and Agnes Grey, unless I am missing something), but in spite of some of the interesting issues it deals with, it’s my least favorite so far.

Mary Roberts Rinehart’s novel The Yellow Room was the latest selection for my mystery book group, and we were supposed to meet this evening at Bloodroot, which advertises itself as a feminist vegetarian restaurant and bookstore. It’s the site where the idea for the mystery group began, so it was the perfect place to hold a meeting. But the weather forecast for this evening called for lots of snow, and we cancelled. (The snow has yet to arrive, though, and it appears as though the weather forecasters may have gotten things wrong. Still, the backroads of Connecticut are narrow, hilly, and winding, and I didn’t want to take my chances.)

It appears from conversations I’ve had, emails I’ve gotten, and Emily’s post on the book that our meeting would probably have turned into a lively conversation about how bad the book is. I can sum up my assessment best by saying that as I neared the end, I didn’t care in the least who the murderer was. That’s a sure sign of a bad mystery novel if there is one, right? I was just eager for the thing to be over so I could move on to something else.

It’s been over a week since I finished the novel and the details are already beginning to fade (another bad sign); what sticks in my mind is the awkward way Rinehart moved her characters around. It seemed like they kept making the same movements from room to room, kept taking the same walks over and over again, and kept repeating the same conversations, covering a little new ground now and then to move the plot along, but not enough to make things exciting. It was wearying. I also found the characters either stereotypical, dull, or completely unbelievable. There’s a romance between two central characters, and maybe this is my fault for being a sloppy reader, but it took me a long time to catch on that this was happening, and when I did catch on, I found it completely contrived and silly. I didn’t understand why he cared about her and even more so why she cared about him.

So what is the story about? A young woman, Carol, travels to Maine to ready the family’s summer home for her brother who is on leave from the war (the novel was published in 1945), and one of the servants finds a woman’s dead body in the closet. This is the sort of thing that never happens in that small coastal Maine town, and the local police force doesn’t seem to be up for the job. Fortunately a neighbor, Jerry Dane, knows just what to do, and he conducts his own investigation, while at the same time recovering from his war injuries and wooing Carol.

The one interesting thing about the book is the way in which it is a product of its time; it’s one of those books that feels very dated, and it’s interesting to think about what makes it so. The class situation is largely at fault; Carol’s family is wealthy and spoiled, and it’s amusing to read about her awful sister who is socially ambitious and utterly heartless, and her horrible brother who is a womanizer who can’t accept that his “youthful exploits” might have some serious consequences. The novel shows how awful these people are, but there’s no sense that Rinehart is critiquing the class differences or the social system that created them. The servants are stereotyped figures, either unreliable and flighty or fiercely loyal, and I had a hard time caring that poor Carol had to manage with so few of them.

So I’m not interested in reading more Mary Roberts Rinehart, even though I did buy an edition that contains two other of her novels in addition to The Yellow Room. Fortunately, I only spent $4.50 on those three novels, so I don’t mind leaving the other two unread.

I finished listening to that Guernsey book and while I’m still not willing to forgive it its awful title, especially since the potato peel pie part of it is mentioned only once and could easily be dispensed with, I really did enjoy it all the way through. There are other things I’m having trouble forgiving the book for, including being a Pride and Prejudice tribute and updating. There’s no good reason someone’s tribute to Pride and Prejudice should irritate me except that everybody’s doing it these days, but that’s enough reason for me. Everybody’s writing tributes to that book, and I wish they would do something new and different instead. I also think the book goes out of its way at times to set up a cute scene and the plot machinations are too obvious.

But all that aside, my point here is that I really did like the book. It’s the kind of book that makes me confront the fact that in spite of priding myself on being cynical and blasé about heart-warming, feel-good novels, I’m susceptible to them. On the one hand, I really, genuinely don’t like them: they are unrealistic and emotionally manipulative. The characters tend to be too good to be true and the world they live in too simple. Things work out in a way they never do in life, and they encourage unrealistic expectations. On the other hand, if a book is as well-written as this one is, I can’t help but get caught up in the story, which is, as we all know, an intensely pleasurable experience. I found myself tearing up embarrassingly often as I was listening to the story unfold; it’s good I was alone in the car as I listened to it because otherwise I would have had good reason to be embarrassed.

In spite of the varied and conflicting emotions I felt as I listened to this book, I think I kept enough critical distance to be able to say that it’s well-done. It has a good mix of the serious with the lighter material; there was enough darkness because of the post-WWII setting to keep the book from feeling frivolous. The characters were well-drawn (although maybe a little too much on the quirky side now and then), and the epistolary form used well. I really do love epistolary novels, so that was a real pleasure. All-in-all, it was worth overlooking the title for.

I’ve heard a lot about that Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society book, but I never paid close attention to what I heard because I thought the title was awful. I don’t like self-consciously cute titles, or self-consciously cute anything, for that matter. But bloggers I like and respect were writing nice things about it and recommending it to me, so I felt I shouldn’t ignore it entirely, and then I happened to see it in my library’s audiobook collection. I wavered a bit deciding what audiobook to get — did I really want to listen to that book with the awful title? But audiobooks are where I take risks now and then; I’m willing to listen to something I might not want to spent time actually reading, since I’m only devoting commuting time to it.

So I checked it out and began listening to it, and now I’m finding I like it. It is a little too self-consciously cute at times, and who knows what I would think if I were reading it in the usual way, as I’m pickier then, but it’s winning me over anyway. There are multiple readers, which works well, as the novel is epistolary, with a number of different writers. All of the readers have been good, and they capture the characters well. And then the book is about books and reading, much in the vein of 84 Charing Cross Road and The Uncommon Reader, two books I really like. It also tells about what happened on the island of Guernsey during the German occupation in World War II, a history I knew nothing about and which is really interesting.

I prefer it when my suspicions are confirmed, my preconceptions are right, and I can continue to look down my nose at books that seem silly to me. But it’s also fun when I’m wrong and I find something new to like.

A friend of mind lent me C.J. Box’s mystery/crime novel Out of Range, and it was perfect for what I needed — something entertaining. It’s not a great book, but it’s good enough to provide some hours of fun.

Out of Range is part of Box’s Joe Pickett series. Pickett is a game warden in Wyoming, a profession that’s pretty well suited to the mystery/crime genre, as there are all sorts of people he runs into and places where he travels as part of the job. He’s responsible for patrolling his district, making sure that hunters, hikers, and anyone else out on the land are following the rules. He has to deal with a whole range of people, including many who do not see the point of his job, philosophically and politically-speaking, and who are ready to make sure he knows it. He also has to deal with tensions in the office and with the local sheriff, and since he’s frequently away from home for days at a time, his wife isn’t particularly happy with him either. It’s not an easy job, but he loves it because of the freedom and independence it gives him. He’s pretty much in charge of his district on all his own, and he gets to decide how he’s going to spend his time and how he will run things.

This particular novel takes Pickett out of his own district and moves him to the much bigger, more complicated district of Jackson Hole, where the previous game warden has just committed suicide. Pickett is the temporary replacement, and he is interested in the opportunity because he and his wife may want to move there permanently. This is a chance to see how such a move might go. But as you might expect, things get really complicated really quickly: Pickett meets environmental protesters, hostile hunters, and a land developer who wants to start a community based on the “Good Meat Movement.” The idea of this movement is that people will live among the animals that will later appear on their tables, so that they know the source of their food. This developer, it turns out, has all the required permissions for the new development lined up, except that of the local game warden. He’s ready to put great pressure on Pickett to provide that final approval.

What I particularly liked about the book is the way Box deals with issues of food sources and land use. The “Good Meat Movement” sounds good in a lot of ways — we are so disconnected from our food sources in the west that it is a healthy thing to know exactly what it means to eat meat — but there is something not quite right in the way the developer wants to fence in land for wild animals in order to create a paradise for rich people. And then there are tensions between environmentalists, some of whom are militant in their views and willing to take action, and hunters want to be left alone in the wild landscape, and who resent any intrusions, whether from animal-rights activists or government employees. There are so many ways to use the miles and miles of open country that Wyoming is blessed with, and the state, as big as it is, doesn’t seem big enough to hold everyone.

I don’t think this is a great book — I didn’t always love the writing and I thought his women characters were too stereotypical — but it’s still a good read, particularly if you like the crime genre and would like to read about the American west. It’s entertaining, with some good ideas to think about, and that’s a combination I like.

Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited is about many things: war, religion, education, love, ambivalent sexuality, class, landscapes, architecture, alcoholism, art, snobbery, friendship, family, nostalgia. I suppose all books are about a lot of things, really, or they wouldn’t be interesting, but this book seemed to have an especially long list, and it’s not that many pages (my edition had 350). I really enjoyed the novel, although I continually felt like I wasn’t quite getting it. I couldn’t decide which things I was supposed to focus on, which were going to be the most important.

Brideshead Revisited seems like an excellent candidate for a rereading because I might understand it better, now that I know what it’s about. I’m not quite sure if this lack of focus is a flaw or not, and another reading might help me figure it out. This is not something I would do any time soon, but perhaps someday. It seems possible that there isn’t a lack of focus at all, but rather that it takes a while to become oriented to what the author is doing, and that a second reading would help me pull everything together.

The novel begins with a war scene: it’s World War II, and the main character, Charles Ryder, is about to move with his company of soldiers to a new camp in England. The soldiers are all tired and dispirited, hoping to see some real action, and disappointed once again. It turns out that the new camp is going to be at Brideshead, a place Charles once knew very well.  The sight of Brideshead sends him back in time to memories of the many days he spent there with the family after meeting Sebastian Flyte at university.

Charles and Sebastian become close friends, and although Sebastian resists it, Charles comes to know the family quite well. It’s an unusual family, partly because Sebastian’s parents have split up, his mother living at Brideshead and his father abroad. Sebastian has two sisters, both of them with very strong personalities. The family is Catholic, setting them apart in an entirely different way. Charles is mildly bewildered by this Catholicism, as he tends to assume everyone is agnostic, but he slowly learns just how much it means to them.

The novel describes how Charles’s relationships with the various family members develop over the course of many years. Sebastian develops a drinking problem and Charles has to choose whether to side with the family and anger his friend or to do what Sebastian wants at the risk of his health. He watches as Julia becomes engaged to a really awful man, and then ends the engagement. He meets both the mother and the father and sees what different paths their lives have taken.

After the opening war scene, Waugh takes us back in time to Charles’s university days, and from there forward, we follow the story chronologically, but we are reminded again and again that Charles is looking back on his life as a young man from the perspective of someone caught up in war and looking out on a changed world. Occasionally Charles will reference an event that happened much later than what he is currently narrating. So although the chronology is clear and fairly well-maintained, there is a strong sense of everything in the past that the present-day narrator has lost. I should add “loss” to my list of themes the book takes up, and it’s one of the most important ones, both on a personal and a national level. Charles revisits Brideshead during the novel’s opening and closing sections, and the changes that have taken place, described in the middle, show how impossible it is to truly revisit the place. It has changed and Charles has changed so much that both have become different beings entirely.

There’s so much going on that I can’t describe it all; I’m ending this post with the same note I started on. Brideshead Revisited may not succeed in developing all the themes it takes up, but it was a pleasure to read such an ambitious and thought-provoking novel.

It’s time to choose another book for the Slaves of Golconda reading group, so head on over to the blog to vote for your choice. The selections are mine this time, and I hope you find something you like. Everyone is welcome to participate.

My question has to do with TBR piles. I wrote a post the other day about Emily’s “Attacking the TBR Tome” challenge, a part of which is the commitment not to buy books until the challenge books are read. This struck me as a sensible challenge, but then Zhiv wrote a spirited defense of acquiring books without guilt, and I began to wonder what, if anything, to do with my desire to buy books accompanied by my feeling that I shouldn’t acquire them unless I’m planning on reading them soon.

There are two book-owning models I’ve got in my mind, battling each other for dominance and leaving me feeling conflicted. For most of my life, I either didn’t buy books unless I needed them for school, or I bought them only when I planned on reading them right away. This is how my parents handled things and how my friends did as well. My house growing up always had a lot of books, but we didn’t have much space to accumulate many more, and we didn’t have the money to buy a lot of books either. We visited the library, mostly. Then for a long time everyone I knew moved frequently, so it didn’t make much sense to accumulate a lot of books. Even books for school were more of a pain to carry around than anything else. And then when I bought a house and felt more settled, I was happy to accumulate books, but no other method occurred to me other than acquiring them as I read them. Hobgoblin and I visited bookshops regularly, but we did so when we needed something new to read, and we generally came home and read our new books right away.

Blogging changed all that, of course; I read about other people buying books at amazing rates, and it seemed like so much fun, I started doing it myself. Then I joined Book Mooch, and while I gave away some books, I got even more back. I visited library book sales and moved to a town with three used bookshops. If you want to know what happened, check this post out. The piles pictured there have gotten much taller, and a third pile on the floor has sprouted up, somehow.

Zhiv says I shouldn’t feel guilty about this, and I think he’s probably right. I don’t like being an acquisitive person, but surely having a lot of books doesn’t really qualify? And most of my TBR collection is made up of used books, so it’s not like I’ve spent a lot of money on them. And even if I had, isn’t it worth while to support the publishing industry?

But I’m someone who never passes up a reason to feel guilty, and so I do. My question is, how many of you have had a similar experience and feel a similar guilt? How do you deal with it?

My mystery book group met this past Saturday to discuss Paco Ignacio Taibo II’s novel The Shadow of the Shadow, which was published in 1986 in Mexico. The discussion was lively, as usual, and opinions were mixed. Mine was one of the more positive views of the book; we’ve started rating our books on a scale of 1 to 10 after we finish the discussion, just for the fun of it, and I gave this one a 7 (and a couple others agreed). To me that meant that the book was a very enjoyable read, but that it didn’t blow me away or leave me determined to read lots of books by this author.

The book is a historical mystery, set in 1920s Mexico, and it deals with the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution, which began in 1910. The world of the novel is one where no one can be trusted, betrayal and violence are everywhere, politics make little sense, revolutions inevitably lead to disappointment and further oppression, and the smartest thing to do is to lie low and stay out of trouble.

That’s certainly what the four main characters want to do, but, of course — or this wouldn’t be much of a novel — they can’t. Instead of the usual one main character, in this novel we get four, and none of them ever emerges as the leader of the group. Instead, once they find themselves drawn into political controversy, they work together to try to get themselves out of it. As the novel begins, one of the men sees a murder of a trombonist who is playing with his band in the park. Shortly afterward, another main character sees a man falling out of a window and a woman looking out the window after him. Soon enough, the characters find themselves enmeshed in a complicated, thoroughly confusing web of political controversy and violence.

I won’t even try to describe the plot any further, because it’s very complicated, but I found it fun to follow. Even more fun, though, was following the relationships among the main characters. The novel’s central conceit is that they are avid dominoes players, and that the basis of their friendship is the games they play night after night. They don’t share much with each other, but the game playing has created a bond among them that leaves them feeling loyal enough to go to great risks for each other. Instead of using their given names, Taibo often refers to most of them by their professions — we have a poet, a lawyer, a reporter, and then the last character is a union organizer, but he is usually refered to as Tomas, or as the Chinaman (who was actually born in Mexico but who speaks with a Chinese accent anyway, and the way that accent gets portrayed is the book’s one really annoying attribute). The characters aren’t terribly well-developed, which comes as no surprise once you know they are usually referred to by their professions or nationality, but we’re given enough to make them interesting and to come to care about what happens to them.

There’s a great emphasis put on language in this book, partly through the reporter, who has much to say about the importance of a free press and who at one point gathers his fellow newspaper editors together to get them involved in solving the mystery. They put the idea of the power of the press to an unusual test. And there is also the poet who is inspired to write poetry at some fairly intense moments, and who also writes advertising slogans at a time when people hadn’t quite realized their potential power. He spends much of his time on those slogans, as they are how he makes a living, but his heart is in his poetry and he is taken with the power of language.

It’s possible to argue that this book makes a conservative argument that political change is dangerous and inevitably violent and that all we can really rely on is friendships among individuals. But Tomas undermines that argument with his work as a union organizer. He is the most serious and politically committed of all the four, and he works hard and makes great sacrifices for the union cause. If it weren’t for him, it would seem that political activism is a waste of time in this novel, but he never loses his loyalty to the cause, and that loyalty is portrayed as admirable.

People in the book group described this novel as like a Quentin Tarantino film in the way that both are full of violence and treat that violence in a light-hearted, funny, over-the-top way. Certainly there is much in Taibo’s book that is exaggerated and grotesque; there is so much violence, and so much of it is stereotyped — there are poisoned chocolates, for example. It’s like he is giving us a survey of all the horrible things that happen in thrillers. I think the Tarantino comparison is valid, but I also think it’s a very different thing to watch a movie and read a book with that kind of tone. The book didn’t feel cold and threatening as violent movies feel to me; instead, we’re given enough room to care for the characters.

So, I liked this book, but I should warn you that others in the group found it dull. I think I’ve come to like books that are playful in tone, especially when they are playful about genre, and that was much of the fun for me.

A short post for a short book … Helene Hanff’s 84, Charing Cross Road is a fun little book about books and those who love them. It’s less than 100 pages and is really even shorter than that, as many of the pages have lots of white space. It’s written in epistolary form — a sub-genre I love — and it’s made up of letters between Helene Hanff and a group of people working at Marks & Co., Booksellers. Helene begins the correspondence with a list of used books she wants and a five dollar bill to cover the costs. Frank Doel from the shop replies. They continue to correspond about her book requests, but they also, slowly, become friends. Helene is a funny, witty correspondent while Frank is much more formal and more guarded, but slowly their letters become more personal and a real friendship emerges. It’s a treat to follow the way their letters change as they begin to address each other more personally, to include details about their lives, and to share their love of books.

Frank is not the only one who keeps up a correspondence with Helene; the whole bookshop comes to anticipate her letters and several others from the shop write her back, although they do so behind Frank’s back because he feels as though Helene is his correspondent. The letters begin in 1949, a time of food rationing in England, and to thank the shop for all the books they have found for her, Helene begins to send them parcels with meat and eggs and other things hard to find. Soon Frank’s family is writing Helene to thank her for her gifts. Everyone tries to persuade Helene to come visit London, which she would love to do, if only she had more money.

The book is fun both for all the book talk — Helene has very decided opinions and tastes in books which she is not shy about expressing — and also for the glimpse it gives into London life in the late 1940s through the 1960s. The correspondence continues for over two decades, so we can follow the paths the characters’ lives take as they navigate the tricky post-war time.

I’m not entirely sure whether to call this a novel or not. As I understand it, it’s a true story; Helene Hanff really was a writer who corresponded with the people at Marks & Co. Booksellers, but I’m not sure whether these letters were the ones they really sent. Either way, it’s highly entertaining, and if you are someone who likes books about books, not to be missed.

I’ll admit I’m a newbie when it comes to ghost stories. I’ve read some, I’m sure, but it was a long, long time ago, and I don’t remember any details. So I don’t have much of a basis of comparison to work with here. What this book taught me, though, is that the circumstances in which one reads a ghost story matter a lot. Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black is only 150 pages long and probably should be read in as close to one sitting as possible. When I had the chance to sit down with this book for more than a few minutes at a time, I got caught up in the atmosphere and enjoyed myself. When I read only small pieces of it before putting it down again to go on to something else, I became too distanced from the story to feel much of the spookiness and suspense.

I did enjoy the illustrations in my edition of the book (the one pictured above); the black and white sketches helped create a sense of what the almost other-worldly landscape must have looked like. I enjoyed the book’s atmosphere more than the story itself; the story is fairly simple and straightforward and not so difficult to figure out, even for someone like me who is generally very bad at figuring things out. But Hill does atmosphere very well, and I liked the descriptions of the town where the people obviously have deep, dark secrets; the house separated from the town by a causeway that is under water when the tide is in; the absolutely unforthcoming driver who carries the main character back and forth; and the terrifyingly shifty and treacherous quicksand reminiscent of the shivering sands in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone.

The story is told by Arthur Kipps, who is surrounded by his happy family but haunted by memories. He decides to write his story down to try to make his ghostly memories disappear once and for all. The story he has to tell takes place when he was much younger, an innocent and confident young man, eager to make his way in the world. He receives an assignment to sort through the papers of a woman who has recently died, a Mrs. Drablow who lives on the coast and whom, he discovers, no one in the town wants to discuss. While at Mrs. Drablow’s funeral, Arthur sees a woman who has seemingly come out of nowhere and who suffers from a some kind of a wasting disease. He asks about her later, but it turns out no one else has seen her, and no one will answer his questions about her. He brushes this aside and continues on with his work, but, of course, this is not the last he sees of the mysterious woman.

And then we are plunged into a familiar dynamic: Arthur knows he is getting himself into a very strange, very creepy situation, and the more time he spends at Mrs. Drablow’s house the more this feeling is confirmed, but he is determined to do his work well, no matter what the consequences. Why should he let a ghostly woman dressed in black keep him from completing his task? Why should he be afraid of spending the night in Mrs. Drablow’s house, even when he knows it is haunted?

Well, he learns why. I liked the fact that — and now I will get to some spoilers — the plot revolves around a mother who is forced to give up her child born out of wedlock. To separate a mother and child is to violate the natural order to such a horrific extent that a terrible revenge is sure to follow. Hill makes clear that the fate of women who have made “mistakes” in love may vary, but it is never good:

A girl from the servant class, living in a closely-bound community, might perhaps have fared better, sixty or so years before, than this daughter of genteel parentage, who had been so coldly rejected and whose feelings were so totally left out of the count. Yet servant girls in Victorian England had, I knew, often been driven to murder or abandon their misconceived children. At least Jennet had known that her son was alive and had been given a good home.

The community has a whole has had to pay a high price for this cruelty. Individual families might perpetrate the wrong on an immediate level, but it is a cultural sin and the culture pays.

On a lighter level, I also liked the role the dog Spider played. Spider was probably the character I cared about most, in fact. The scene where she almost gets lost in the quicksand is the most harrowing one in the book. One of the most frightening things I can think of is a dog who is thoroughly freaked out and frightened for reasons we can’t understand. Surely that dog knows something we don’t?

I didn’t think this was a great book, but I thought it was a competent one, and it makes me a little more curious than I was before about other ghost stories and about what else Susan Hill has written.

If you would like to read more posts on the book, check out the Slaves of Golconda blog and the discussion forums. I hope to see you there!

I’m deep in the middle of the semester now, and in need of shorter books and lighter reading, since my time is limited and when I do have time, I often don’t have energy. So I thought I’d continue my reread of the Anne of Green Gables series, which I began over a year ago with a group of Anne devotees. The second book in the series is Anne of Avonlea, and it takes Anne from her sixteenth year to her eighteenth, during which time she — unbelievably to contemporary readers — becomes a school teacher. How can someone sixteen be in charge of teaching a room full of children of all different ages? It’s a reminder of how different a time it was when Anne was alive (or alive in someone’s imagination).

I enjoyed the book and found it just the thing for my frazzled brain, but … I had some doubts too. I remember reading through the whole series multiple times as a child, but I don’t really remember which books were my favorites and which weren’t. I’m guessing that this one wouldn’t have been a favorite, though, largely because the pace is slower than the first Anne book, and it could use some more narrative tension. Both the first and the second books are very episodic in structure and take Anne through one adventure after another, but in the first book, Anne is a brand new character and this keeps her adventures intriguing. They are often very funny as well. In the second book, we know what to expect from Anne, and that’s pretty much what we continue to get — lots of imagination, impulsiveness, and rash actions repented of later. It’s charming and amusing, but it doesn’t surprise anymore, and there’s no other plot arc or source of tension or suspense.

I’m also not sure what I think of Anne’s brand of imagination, either. She lives in — or at least frequently retreats into — a dreamworld of fairies, elves, dryads, and other mystical creatures, and I have no problem with this whatsoever, but when Miss Lavendar and Paul Irving arrive on the scene sharing similar imaginative fancies, I wonder where they all picked up such similar ways of dreaming. Did they all grow up reading the same kinds of stories? Was every imaginative person of the time dreaming in the same kind of way? All this stretched plausibility a bit, which made me feel more at a distance from the story than I expected to be.

But, that said, I already have the next book in the series on the way through Book Mooch (Anne of the Island), and I’m looking forward to reading it, maybe soon or maybe in a year or two. I do like Anne, and I like the process of reading through the series again. I may read through other childhood favorites as well, as the mood strikes. Doubts and mild disappointments as I reread books don’t bother me too terribly much, and they are always interesting to think about.

I go through stages of listening to audiobooks on my commute to work (about 40 minutes each way) and then not, and now I’m in a stage where I’m listening to them avidly. After finishing Elizabeth Strout’s Abide with Me, I turned to Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca and then to Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express, which I just finished on the drive home tonight.

Listening to Rebecca was a fabulous experience; it’s my first encounter with a du Maurier novel, and probably not my last. It’s a perfect book to listen to. It’s from a first-person perspective, first of all, which means there’s an intimacy to the voice (a literal voice, of course, not metaphorical) that pulls me into the story. It’s also such a moody, atmospheric novel, and having someone read it to me increases that sense of atmosphere. I respond to the words, of course, but also to a tone of voice and a manner of pronouncing those words, and that tone and manner enrich the whole experience.

I probably don’t need to tell you what a wonderfully fun book it is — such a good story, such interesting relationships among the characters, such a complex situation and a suspenseful ending.

Murder on the Orient Express was also enjoyable to listen to, but it didn’t go quite as well as Rebecca did. I’m wondering if it isn’t as well-suited to listening as du Maurier’s book is. The problem was that it was very hard to keep the details straight. Murder is one of those puzzle-type mysteries where all the evidence is given and it’s possible for the reader to piece it all together (or at least I think it might be — I could never accomplish such a feat myself, so I can only assume that others with minds better suited to the task could). Hercules Poirot and the two men who work with him go over the evidence again and again, scouring it for information and clues. All this was hard to keep straight when I couldn’t flip back and forth in the book to double-check information.

So now I’m thinking I should listen to books that emphasize character and atmosphere rather than ones that require me to keep track of a complicated plot or remember a lot of information. But it’s also true that I’m drawn to character-driven books anyway, so perhaps the audio format just confirms and perhaps enhances the biases that already exist.

Both books showed me that the audio format makes the techniques authors use to generate suspense much more transparent. Since I couldn’t flip a page or two ahead or even look down to the bottom of the page to see what was coming, I had to sit there waiting breathlessly for the narrator to say the words that would clear up the mystery. When Hercules Poirot has gathered everyone together at the novel’s end to go through the evidence one last time and to reveal the solution to the mystery, I was acutely aware of the way Christie has him stop right before the final revelation to make a digression designed to drive the reader crazy with suspense. The ending of Rebecca felt exactly the same way. With a regular book, an author can’t control the order in which you read the words and can only hope that you experience the suspense he or she was trying to create. You can skip ahead on a CD, of course, but it’s not nearly as easy as flipping through the pages of a book skimming for revealing information.

About a week ago, Hobgoblin handed me a book and said he thought I would like it. This usually means I smile politely and say thanks and then put the book away. Hobgoblin does this to me when I recommend a book, too. In fact, I’ve praised Infinite Jest so highly and told him he should read it so often that now I’m worried he won’t. This time he handed me Christopher Morley’s Parnassus on Wheels and said it was about books and that it was a really fast read. I was in the mood for something exactly like that, so I broke with tradition and started reading.

And it turned out to be a whole lot of fun. It’s a book that celebrates reading and the love of books in a humorous, whimsical kind of way that is thoroughly charming. It reminds me quite a bit of Alan Bennett’s book The Uncommon Reader about Queen Elizabeth learning to love reading. The books have a similar sensibility; they portray reading as simultaneously a great amusement and also an activity that can change your life. Once you have begun reading, you have no idea where the habit will take you.

The story is told in the first person by Helen McGill, a woman who lives on a farm in Connecticut with her brother, Andrew. Andrew was once a steady, reliable person, but then he took to reading, and then to writing, and then he became a famous author, and now he can’t be trusted to do his share of the farm work. Helen finds this intensely irritating, and she does what she can to thwart Andrew’s ambitions, and to try to keep him from wandering around the countryside gathering material for his next book.

Helen is a fun narrator; she has a self-confident, matter-of-fact, no-nonsense tone, and she is frequently hilarious. Here’s how the novel opens:

I wonder if there isn’t a lot of bunkum in higher education? I never found that people who were learned in logarithms and other kinds of poetry were any quicker in washing dishes or darning socks. I’ve done a good deal of reading when I could, and I don’t want to “admit impediments” to the love of books, but I’ve also seen lots of good practical folk spoiled by too much fine print. Reading sonnets always gives me hiccups, too.

She is also capable of adventure, although this quality catches her by surprise. When a man drives up to her farm with a wagon full of books claiming that he wants to sell it to Andrew, she realizes she needs to act quickly. The man is Roger Mifflin, and he has spent years traveling around the countryside selling people books from his collection. He has loved his trade, but now he wants to retire to Brooklyn to write the story of his adventures, and he believes he can persuade Andrew to pick up where he is leaving off and become an iterant salesman himself. Worried about being abandoned, Helen makes an impulsive decision and buys the wagon herself, and the next thing she knows, she is off on an adventure, traveling around the countryside selling books herself, with Roger Mifflin for company, at least for a while.

So the novel tells the story of her adventures — how she sees more of the world than she ever had before, sees just how much Roger is in love with books and reading, and learns how transforming books can be.

It’s a light and amusing book, but it argues for a particular way of thinking about reading. Roger Mifflin makes a number of long speeches such as this one about what he is trying to do when he sells books:

You see, my idea is that the common people — in the country, that is — never have had any chance to get hold of books, and never have had any one to explain what books can mean. It’s all right for college presidents to draw up their five-foot shelves of great literature, and for the publishers to advertise sets of their Linoleum Classics, but what the people need is the good, homely, honest stuff — something that’ll stick to their ribs — make them laugh and tremble and feel sick to think of the littleness of this popcorn ball spinning in space without ever even getting a hot-box! And something that’ll spur ’em on to keep the hearth well swept and the wood pile split into kindling and the dishes washed and dried and put away. Anyone who can get the country people to read something worth while is doing his nation a real service.

It’s the idea of literature pleasing and instructing both — it should be thrilling and fun, and it should also inspire people to be better, more industrious human beings, which will, in turn, make America a stronger country.

Part of the charm of this book is its idealism, and it’s fun to get caught up in the happy mood, even if in my darker moments I don’t buy the idealism at all. The book almost crosses into an irritating naïveté, but it doesn’t quite (for me at least); it is saved by not taking itself too seriously. The humor keeps everything light, and the narrator’s practicality keeps everything in perspective.

And now when I’m in the mood for it, I have the sequel, The Haunted Bookshop to look forward to.

I finished this book about a week ago and have thought of it off and on since then, and I’m still not entirely sure what I want to say about it. There were times when I thought it was incredibly moving and insightful, times when I thought it dragged a bit, times when I loved what it had to say about families, and times when I got annoyed because I couldn’t keep the minor characters straight. I suppose ultimately I don’t think this is a perfect book, but it offered a lot ot think about.

The story is a harsh one, and I was drawn to it for that reason. It has a tone I don’t often find in women writers (although I won’t pretend to have done an exhaustive survey) — blunt, dark, bleak, and open about the harsher and seedier aspects of life. It’s not a hopeless book, but it’s one that won’t let you forget how much people can suffer. I wouldn’t want to read sad books like this one all the time, but now and then I find I want to read someone who looks directly at the harsher, uglier sides of life.

The first-person narrator is Alison, a woman in her forties who ekes a living out of part-time jobs. While she once was beautiful, the hard life she has lived has worn her down, and she now has hepatitis and suffers from a damaged arm that gets in the way of the cleaning job she tries to hold on to. The novel follows Alison through the course of one day as she walks to work and then to a friend’s house, and finally to the woods just outside her city in California. Lengthy flashbacks tell the story of Alison’s youth and young adulthood.

Alison became a model at a very young age and found herself swept up into a world where beautiful young women care so much about having great careers and becoming famous super-models that they are willing to do whatever it takes to live out their dreams, and male agents and photographers take full advantage of all the opportunities for sexual exploitation this provides. It’s a life full of money, glamour, drugs, parties, and casual sex. Alison heads to France where her modeling career really takes off, as a fabulously wealthy and powerful agent takes her on as his girlfriend. Her family back home in New Jersey has little idea what Alison has gotten herself into, but they are too passive and caught up in their own troubles to do anything to bring Alison home.

Alison’s meteoric rise is followed by a catastrophic fall as her boyfriend rejects her and she returns home to New Jersey to become a student again and try to turn her life around. She moves to New York to work at temp jobs and to try to work her way back into the modeling world, with only partial success. It’s in one of her temp jobs that she meets Veronica, a woman significantly older than Alison is, and who bewilders Alison with her brash attitude and her outlandish taste in clothing. The two become friends, improbably, and although Alison doesn’t quite understand why she is drawn to Veronica and she sometimes fails to be a good friend to her, the two stay in touch. When Alison finds out Veronica has AIDS, she becomes even more important in her life.

Veronica seems an unlikely character to name the book after, since there are long sections of the book that don’t concern her at all, and we aren’t introduced to her until after we have been reading for a while. But it’s Alison’s friendship with Veronica that provides a center to her story; she is a question the story picks at again and again as Alison tries to figure out what Veronica has meant to her. From her perspective as a more mature woman looking back on her life, it turns out that Veronica has meant a great deal.

There is a lot of beauty in the writing here; Gaitskill describes Alison’s habit of thinking about her life through music particularly well, and although she is distanced from her father, this is something they share. For both of them music is a way of trying to communicate the longings they can’t find words to express. The entire book feels like an effort to express those things that are so hard to put into words. Alison tries to understand the experiences that have shaped her life, but sometimes the most she can do is to ask questions, to speculate, and to marvel at what has happened.

At times the pacing felt uneven, and the minor characters come and go without much definition and sometimes without much interest, but still, there is much to enjoy and contemplate here.

So my mystery book group met this past Saturday to discuss Cornell Woolrich’s The Black Angel, and, as usual, it was a great discussion. It was the kind of discussion where many if not all of us left the meeting with different ideas about the book than those we had originally — not necessarily that we liked the book any better, but that we understood new things about it. Or perhaps I should just speak for myself — my understanding of the book is different now than it was before. I still have mixed feelings about it, but they are mixed in a different way.

The book is classic noir (or that’s what the cover calls it) from 1943, written from the first person point of view of Alberta French, a woman whose husband has just been arrested for murder. He has supposedly murdered his lover, and Alberta has the shocking experience of discovering the dead body and her husband’s unfaithfulness all at once. While recovering from the shock, she decides her husband is innocent, that she’s willing to forgive him, and that she wants to do what she can to find out who the true murderer is.

The one clue in the story is a matchbook with the personalized letter “M” on it that Alberta finds at the crime scene. After finding the matchbook, Alberta stumbles across the murdered woman’s address book, and soon she is off on a quest to meet all the people listed under “M.” One of them has to be the real murderer.

I’m a sucker for a good plot device, and I liked this one, at least at first. It’s fun to watch Alberta try to worm her way into the lives of each of her possible suspects. Each encounter with a suspect turns into its own little episode in which Alberta goes places and sees things she’s never seen before, and these stories can be wild and suspenseful. The first two of these episodes work well. Alberta finds herself in some horribly seedy dives on the Bowery (the novel is set in New York City) as she meets the dead woman’s former husband, and then she runs into a doctor who turns out to be a drug dealer — or rather, he expects Alberta to be the drug dealer.

But from there the novel goes downhill fast. I found the next two episodes entirely unbelievable. The plot starts to move too fast, and it feels as though Woolrich started to get tired of his whole scheme and wanted to rush through to the end. I started the book willing to suspend my disbelief quite a bit, since it didn’t seem right to demand strict realism from this book given the genre, but even my low expectations were violated. It’s such a bad feeling to get jolted out of the world of the story like this, one moment enjoying the suspense and the next laughing scornfully at the ridiculousness of the whole thing.

Other people in my book group found Alberta an annoying character and an unbelievable one, but I liked her voice, at least at first. There was something about her straightforwardness and her desperate recklessness that appealed to me. But Becky’s point that she might be an unreliable narrator made me think of her in a new way. She is very young and she seems so innocent and so sweetly devoted to her husband that it’s easy to fail to take into account that over the course of the novel she does some pretty awful things, including the drug dealing and much worse. She justifies it all by saying that it’s to save her husband, but after thinking about the lengths to which she goes, I can’t help but question her sanity. She is so focused on discovering the truth that she is incapable of seeing anything else. What does it mean, really, to be willing to do just about anything for the sake of love? And is that a love anybody in their right mind would want to share?

I don’t know the noir genre very well, but I’m curious if anybody knows any other examples that have a female narrator. This book felt very different to me than the other examples we have read so far, Dashiell Hammett’s The Glass Key and Ross Macdonald’s The Underground Man, and part of the difference is that it’s a woman who is narrating the story (and part of it, of course, is that the other two are better written). She’s not a very emotive narrator, by any means, but there is a vulnerability and openness to the voice that I haven’t found elsewhere. It didn’t feel very “noir” to me for those reasons, and I began to wonder if part of what it means to be “noir” is to be from a male point of view. But I’d love to hear otherwise if that’s not true.

So, after that very interesting read, we are turning to Paco Ignacio Taibo’s The Shadow of the Shadow. This is an author I’ve never heard of (as Woolrich was as well), and I’m looking forward to discovering something new.

I picked up Antonia White’s Frost in May not knowing at all what it is about, and I was amused to find that it’s about a young girl beginning life at a Catholic boarding school — I say I was amused because it seems that nearly everything I’m reading these days has a religious or spiritual theme to it. I’m still slowly reading through Pema Chödrön’s When Things Fall Apart, which is about a spiritual approach to suffering, and then there is Elizabeth Strout’s Abide with Me, about a pastor and his relationship with his congregation. And now Frost in May, which is all about intense religious devotion. But White’s book is harsher and darker than the other two, and much more critical of organized religion.

The main character, Nanda, comes from a family that converted to Catholicism, and Nanda feels an ardor and devotion to her new religion that perhaps is unique to converts. It means she is an outsider in her new school, however, The Convent of the Five Wounds, where most of the students come from families who have never been anything but Catholic. She is an outsider for other reasons as well: she doesn’t come from money as most of the other students do. This is a very common set-up for a novel, I suppose — young child struggling to find her way in a new environment that she finds bewildering, surrounded by people who aren’t like her at all — but White does an excellent job making a frequently-told story fresh and fascinating.

The novel’s opening scenes show Nanda trying to find her way through a bewilderingly complex set of rules that governs every part of the girls’ lives. It’s shocking to discover just how circumscribed and controlled the girls’ lives were. Nanda is told how she should walk and eat, and in what position she should sleep at night (on her back with her arms crossed on her chest). She and her schoolmates are not allowed to have “particular friendships,” and if they are caught spending too much time with any one girl, the two are separated. Their reading is almost entirely limited to devotional works, with only occasional indulgences in the most serious and uplifting fiction available. And the list of limitations and requirements goes on and on.

Nanda accepts all this, for the most part, because she really and truly wants to be a good Catholic, and although she is secretly terrified of receiving a call to be a nun herself, she adores the disciplines and practices of her religion.

But she starts the book as an outsider, and she remains one; she struggles and struggles to be the kind of person the nuns think she should be, but she never quite gets it right, and eventually the seeds of rebellion are sown.

White does an excellent job capturing the feeling of the convent school; the book is focused almost exclusively on the school itself, so that it becomes its own world, impervious to everything outside it. The convent is somewhere outside London, but that hardly matters; all that matters is the atmosphere of the school itself. When Nanda’s parents visit, she feels horribly awkward and unhappy at the way her mother does everything wrong — she is too loud, too happy, too willing to mock what Nanda holds dear. She is relieved when her parents leave and the familiar order is restored. Even though the nuns can be cruel, and they do what they can to rid her of her pride and individuality, she rejoices in all her sacrifices and deprivations — until the point when she doesn’t.

The book isn’t perfect — I thought some sections in the middle languished a bit and some of the plot and character maneuverings seemed awkward — but still, it’s a wonderful portrait of what it’s like to be a serious, idealistic, devout child and then teenager, caught up in an intricately-structured and carefully-controlled world, trying to live up to everyone’s high expectations, including her own. And it’s a fascinating picture of one version of the religious life — a particularly harsh and harmful one, although one that’s full of beauty too.

I mentioned the other day that I listened to Elizabeth Strout’s novel Abide with Me, and that book has convinced me that I should probably take a look at her other books as well. It’s a quiet, thoughtful character study, and I liked its insights into small-town life and what it’s like to try to be a spiritual leader when one’s life is falling apart.

The novel is set in a small town in Maine in the late 1950s, and the main character is the pastor of the Congregational church, Tyler Caskey, who just a year ago lost his wife and is now trying to cope with his grief and take care of his two young daughters. In a long flashback, Strout tells the story of how Tyler met his wife, Lauren, a woman from a much wealthier, more stylish family, and how the two of them settled into their new life in town. The congregation fell in love with Tyler, but could never quite accept Lauren, with her monied, Massachusetts background, her suspect love of fashion, and her complete disinterest in leading prayer groups. Tyler and Lauren were deeply in love, but it was a young, sudden, and inexperienced kind of love, and it quickly becomes clear that the two of them are headed into trouble, until one day Lauren gets sick and soon she is gone.

So Tyler is left on his own to grieve and to figure out how to lead an entirely new kind of life. And things quickly begin to fall apart. His daughter Katherine has failed to make friends at school and mutters things like “I hate God” in church. His housekeeper disappears under suspicious circumstances. He has trouble writing sermons. His mother pesters him to find a new wife. His congregation has begun to distrust him. And Tyler doesn’t know how to respond to any of this.

The character of Tyler is the triumph of this book; he is wise, kind, earnest, slow but with charisma, and an excellent deliverer of sermons. He believes with all his heart in everything he preaches and tries as best as he can to be a good person and to do his job well. He’s also naive and afraid of conflict, and it’s these qualities that get him into trouble. When his congregation starts to turn against him, he can’t understand why, and he doesn’t grasp that he needs to act quickly to change their minds. He believes that being a good person and doing his best is enough. It’s heartbreaking that these beliefs just aren’t true, and it seems unfair that people like Tyler have to learn lessons in the really painful way he does.

The book’s other triumph is its portrayal of small-town life, particularly small-town life in rural Maine in the 1950s. Tyler’s wife Lauren is a foolish character in a lot of ways, but surely everyone would sympathize with her horror at the boredom and isolation she experiences. Her mother-in-law gives her a book on how to be a pastor’s wife, and when she playfully begins to read it out loud to Tyler, she soon stops, bewildered by the advice she gets. Many of the other women in town are just as bored and unhappy as she is, and when one woman tells another to “just make the beds, then you’ll feel better,” it’s hardly encouraging. The picture of small-town life and 1950s pre-feminist frustration Strout creates is a familiar one, but she treats the subject with subtlety and acuteness and it never feels stereotyped.

So now I’m eager to read more of Strout’s books. Olive Kitteridge would be a logical next place to go, as it won the Pulitzer, and there is also Amy and Isabelle. It’s fun to find another author whose work I’d like to follow.

Victor Hugo’s The Last Day of a Condemned Man is fiction written with a purpose, and when someone writes fiction in order to make a point, as opposed to wanting to create great art, I can’t help but have my doubts about quality (although does that great art/political purpose opposition really hold up? Not sure.). Hugo’s book (kindly sent to me by Oneworld Classics) isn’t great art, I think, but it does do some interesting things fictionally, and it makes its political point in a powerful way.

It’s a book about the death penalty, and this edition opens with a preface by Hugo outlining his objections to the practice, so there is no doubt as you begin the story itself where Hugo stands. The novel takes the form of a diary written by a man living out his last days before he faces the guillotine. We aren’t told immediately, but eventually we find out he has committed murder, and there is never any doubt about whether he is guilty or not. The man writes down his thoughts and feelings over the course of the days leading up to his execution, and we follow him right up to the point before he is led away to his death.

What is interesting about the book is the way it allows you to imagine what it must be like to know you are about to die, that you will have a particularly gruesome death, and that crowds will be watching and cheering as your head is severed from your body. Hugo captures the torments his character goes through with enough detail and vividness that you can’t help but get caught up in the fear and turmoil. Here’s an example of what I mean:

They say it’s nothing, that you don’t suffer, that it’s a gentle end, that death is much simpler like that…. are they sure you don’t suffer? Who told them that? Has anyone heard of a severed head covered in blood that got up on the edge of the basket and shouted to the crowds: “That didn’t hurt?”

Are there any dead people who have come back and thanked them, saying: “It’s well designed. Leave it as it is. The mechanism is fine.”

Was it Robespierre? Was it Louis XVI?…

No, not at all! Less than a minute, less than a second and the deed is done. If only in their minds, have they ever put themselves in the place of the one who is there when the heavy chopper comes down and bites into flesh, severs nerves, shatters vertabrae… What! Half a second! Any pain is avoided…

Hideous!

Hugo also does a great job of describing the settings in which the condemned man finds himself, particularly the crowd scenes as the man is shuttled about to various cells before his execution. He makes you feel what it is like to be the center of attention at the point when one of the worst things that could possibly happen is about to happen to you:

In the clamour all around me I could no longer tell cries of pity from shouts of delight, laughter from groans, voices from noises; it was all just buzzing in my head, like an echo in a cooking pot.

Unthinkingly my eyes read the shop signs.

At one point I was seized with a bizarre curiosity to turn round and see where I was going. It was my mind’s last act of bravado. But my body didn’t want to; my neck was paralysed as if in anticipation of death.

I’m against the death penalty, so I’m not sure how someone who thinks otherwise would respond to this book, but if imagining how horrible it must be to face execution could sway anybody’s opinion, then this book could do it. The argument seems to be that execution is too awful a penalty to impose on anyone, and while that may not be the best anti-death penalty argument out there, it certainly is an argument well-suited to fiction. Fiction is particularly good at helping us understand what it’s like to be somebody else and at inspiring us to imagine things we have never experienced, so why not use its powers to inspire pity and terror in readers in order to persuade them to be merciful?

In addition to The Last Day of a Condemned Man, the Oneworld Classics edition contains another anti-death penalty work, a short story called “Claude Gueux.” The story is about how the justice system turns a man who stole something out of desperation, we aren’t told what, into a murderer. Society is arranged in such a way, the story argues, that pushes people toward crime, and then once they have committed that crime, it punishes them cruelly. There are stronger arguments to make against an unjust society than these works offer, but they still accomplish a lot: they make you think and feel and imagine what it must be like to be condemned.