Circelli’s ambitious work of fiction explores some interesting subject matter. The bulk of the novel focuses on the experiences of Francesca and MicolCircelli’s ambitious work of fiction explores some interesting subject matter. The bulk of the novel focuses on the experiences of Francesca and Micola Benvenuto, the daughters of poor, uneducated southern Italian parents who immigrated to Montreal after World War II.
Francesca, the elder sister, is feisty and determined, greatly influenced by her hard-left-leaning cousin Ottavio, who’s committed to the revolution that promises to empower the working class. In the 1970s, he leaves Montreal to contribute to the “Movement� in Italy, joining the Red Brigade, a terrorist organization responsible for the kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro, the Italian president. Francesca eventually follows Ottavio to Rome and also participates in the work of the radical group, though in a lesser role than her cousin. She will pay a steep price for that involvement.
Micola, the younger Benvenuto sister, an ethereal beauty, is dreamy and musically gifted. She’s also compliant and obedient . . . until she suddenly isn’t. When encouraged by her charismatic friend, Paolo Richards, who recognizes Micola’s extraordinary talent, the sheltered young woman agrees to sing at a Montreal nightclub. This leads to her being offered a weekly gig at an even more prestigious venue where both Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell have performed. Along the way, Micola falls madly and recklessly in love with a multi-talented, womanizing Jewish musician.
While the Benvenuto girls are permitted to attend informal political gatherings at cousin Ottavio’s house, their traditional, controlling, and often violent father otherwise keeps them on a very tight leash. Their womanly purity is not to be corrupted; socializing with the opposite sex, unless chaperoned, is verboten. Lies and alibis are therefore necessary for the sisters to get themselves out of the house on the evenings that Micola sings. Of course there’s hell to pay when Mr. Benvenuto learns what his daughters have been up to. Tragedy strikes the family.
The account of the sisters� lives is bookended by the story of another character: Chiara, a youngish woman in her thirties who has recently left graduate school and is at loose ends. Of course, there are still bills to pay. Chiara needs a job (and distraction). She is happily (and conveniently) hired by none other than Paolo Richards. This old friend of the Benvenuto sisters is now living in Toronto and the owner of a flower shop. After years of academic immersion in the philosophy of Kant and Hegel, Chiara finds being in the company of plants immensely restful. She has recently fled a romantic relationship with Daniel Cohen, a young Jewish man, offering him no explanation for her departure and refusing to communicate at all. It seems that the intensity of her emotions for him terrify her. Habitually asocial, psychologically detached from others, and temperamentally predisposed to feeling nothing much at all, Chiara is suddenly set upon by intrusive emotions and strange visions, which may be repressed memories. Images of a fall, broken glass, and blood plague her. Naming her experience the “Thing,� Chiara begins psychoanalysis in order to grapple with the material bubbling up from her subconscious. In time, Paolo, the flower shop owner, will present her with a suitcase of notebooks and letters that will help her make sense of her inner turmoil.
As mentioned, this is an ambitious novel. I appreciated the insights it offered into the culture and experiences of southern Italian immigrants to Canada. Prior to reading the book, I knew next to nothing about Italy’s turbulent post-war period, so I also valued Circelli’s exploration of that country’s “Years of Lead� and her depiction of some of the terrorist activities of the Red Brigade. Reading about the music scene in 1960s and �70s Montreal was a further bonus.
Having said all this, I must add that there are major issues with the novel that I am unable to overlook. First of all, the narrative is often melodramatic. Occasionally overblown, even maudlin, prose and Circelli’s amateurish characterization amplify the problem. Paulo and Micola in particular are absurdly, even laughably, romanticized. (e.g., After being spirited off from an insane asylum by an angelic nurse, tragically beautiful Micola spends years sitting in a grotto on the Amalfi coast: mute, weeping, and communing with the sea.) Add to all of this a few too many coincidences (most of them courtesy of the magical Paulo), the misrepresentation of the concept of epigenetic trauma (inheriting one’s parents� past experiences), and a too-tidy, wish-fulfilling conclusion, and you have a novel whose initial potential has been irreparably thwarted.
For these reasons, a rating of 2.5/5 has been rounded down to a 2....more
This novel of the supernatural, based on Jamaican folklore, reads like badly executed young adult fiction. The poor quality of the prose made it imposThis novel of the supernatural, based on Jamaican folklore, reads like badly executed young adult fiction. The poor quality of the prose made it impossible for me to suspend my disbelief and enter the story. There was potential here, and a good editor might have made all the difference. I bailed at page 70. Cannot recommend....more
I knew from the description provided by the publisher that this would be a quirky and unusual read. It is not often that one encounters a main charactI knew from the description provided by the publisher that this would be a quirky and unusual read. It is not often that one encounters a main character of Roger Prumont’s type: a recently divorced, 55-year-old former healthcare marketing professional who’s devised a method for predicting mass shootings. The topic is a sensitive one and I was curious as to how the author, Trevor Houser, would deal with it. I read the first five chapters only to discover that it was largely through sardonic humour that didn’t strike me as funny in the least, musings from the main character about the mathematicians who’ve inspired his method, and descriptions of some of the motels and towns he’s stayed in as he has carried out his investigations and refined his method. There are also a lot of recipes for cocktails—yes, Roger is a cocktail aficionado. I’m sorry to report that I found the whole thing incredibly dull and tedious. Perhaps this novel improves. Perhaps this novel would appeal to someone with a sense of humour like the author’s. Perhaps there’s an ideal reader somewhere out there. That someone wasn’t me.
Thank you to Net Galley and the publisher for providing me with an ARC. The novel and I were not a good match, and I was unable to complete it....more
If it were possible for dullness to be profound (rather than simply flat) this would take the cake. I read only the first section, “Friday�, and was eIf it were possible for dullness to be profound (rather than simply flat) this would take the cake. I read only the first section, “Friday�, and was enervated by the tedium. Multiple characters� perspectives could neither jumpstart my attention nor prevent my eyes from glazing over. I could not have cared less about the characters. I understand that the glacial creep of the narrative was supposed to accelerate later, but the idea of enduring the literary equivalent of watching paint dry and getting to “Tuesday� (the penultimate section) felt like unnecessary punishment. I’m obviously an outlier, but I was not impressed with this book. In addition to poor (nil) plot momentum and uninteresting characters, the prose felt forced, trying too hard to be noticed. I noticed . . . and then some. After that, I closed the ebook and returned it to the library. I did enjoy that feeling....more
Hasan’s début novel begins with promise and intelligence. It focuses on Maya, a woman who works for a Geneva-based NGO dedicated to running orphanagesHasan’s début novel begins with promise and intelligence. It focuses on Maya, a woman who works for a Geneva-based NGO dedicated to running orphanages in Africa. As the book opens, she has been directed to travel to the (fictional) village of Likanni in an unnamed African nation to deal with a scandal. Marc, a colleague with whom Maya worked for a decade, has been accused of the rape of twenty-year-old Lele, a local girl who assisted with administrative duties at the Likanni site. Maya was the one who allowed the child to shadow her on the job some years before. Now, in response to Lele’s sexual assault, violence looms. Enraged locals have gathered for days outside the charity’s office in the repurposed dormitory of a former Catholic monastery. All staff but Marc and his supervisor, Chantal, both French nationals, have been sent home.
Since Maya forged such strong bonds with the people of Likanni during her years there, she’s considered the ideal official to calm the volatile situation. Ostensibly, her job is to investigate the allegations and report to headquarters, but the real expectation is that the charity’s brand be preserved so that valuable donors aren’t lost. As far as Maya is concerned, this is her last undertaking on behalf of the NGO. She’s had enough of the work and is convinced that the West is largely responsible for the very problems it purports to be addressing. She wearily observes that if humanitarian workers are in the field long enough, they can no longer feel at home anywhere. The superficiality and materialism of the West are intolerable, while remaining in war-torn, famine-prone regions becomes untenable. Once idealistic do-gooders have witnessed so much cruelty, violence, and suffering they become blank, incapable of feeling much of anything at all.
Since Maya took on an administrative role in the organization five years earlier, she has typically travelled to Africa only a couple of times a year to perform oversight. Even that has become too much. She now has a young daughter, and her marriage to an older, wealthy, high-powered lawyer is on the rocks. She’s well aware that her husband is having an affair and that when she’s away he brings his paramour to their high-end L.A. home. Another interesting detail about the main character is that she herself was an orphan, adopted from Bangladesh by solidly middle-class, white Californian parents. She has no connection with or feeling for the South Asian country she was born in, no familiarity with its culture, but is frequently asked by Americans where she’s from and notices that people are puzzled by her lack of an accent. In Africa, though, Maya is never taken for anything other than a “First Worlder.�
I was initially very impressed by this novel. It’s full of sharp—and sometimes scathing—insights and observations about humanitarian work and those who are drawn to it. The early part of Maya’s investigation into the Likanni scandal is handled well and convincingly by the author. Maya comes across as ethical, principled, and determined to handle the matter fairly. She knows both parties, Marc and Lele, and in fact credits the former with having saved her life during a traumatic period in Likanni. However, the novel takes a real nosedive just past the halfway point. What seemed to be a serious and realistic work of fiction addressing a compelling and topical matter turns into a melodramatic thriller, largely because of the author’s clumsy introduction of an unconvincing local character. Credibility is sacrificed to a twisty plot. Maya goes rogue, behaving like an unhinged teenager.
My overall impression is that Hasan wasn’t clear about the sort of book she wanted to write. Hopefully, with her next effort she’ll know....more
Walls’s very peculiar novel begins with his 14-year-old protagonist, Orla McDevitt, attempting to make a nighttime escape from her troubled home. She Walls’s very peculiar novel begins with his 14-year-old protagonist, Orla McDevitt, attempting to make a nighttime escape from her troubled home. She wants to get to Liverpool and cross to Northern Ireland. Aunt Sinéad lives in Drumahoe and the girl’s mother was recently buried there. Orla’s mum died of esophageal cancer two months before, and the McDevitt house has been in chaos ever since. Mr. McDevitt drinks heavily, the house is squalid, and Orla is often left to care for her two-year-old sister. At school, she’s doing poorly. The teachers have cut her a fair bit of slack, but they know her home life is unstable. The family is on the radar of child welfare services, and the children may be taken into care. Fear, anger, and grief are fuelling Orla’s plan to run, but there may be other factors at play as well. Soon the girl’s hope for a miracle will become her main motivation for leaving home.
Orla is an unpleasant, even unsympathetic, protagonist: foul-mouthed, egocentric, and a shoplifter. Her best friend, Jamie, was recently suspended from school after a bag of stolen iPhones was discovered in his locker. Orla’s missing him now because the ferry trip to Belfast can only be funded by selling what she’s nicked and it’s hard to work as a solo shoplifter when you’re used to being part of a dynamic “mad-dog� duo. Food for her trip must also be stolen. That, too, is something of a challenge, but Orla meets it.
Based on the elements I’ve described, I thought I was in for a realistic, somewhat gritty tale about an angry, grieving adolescent girl. I was wrong. This is a surreal narrative I could make little sense of.
Walls introduces an unexpected character—Jesus. He appears as filthy, foul-smelling homeless man, entirely naked but for a blanket. He’s come back to guide humanity, he says, having emerged from a box at the bottom of the sea where many bodies of the dead lie. He is now living in a derelict barn preparing for his mission, trying to find the right location to start, the place most in need of his message. He intercepts Orla as she attempts to make a late-night escape by bike. Why he does so is not clear. After scrabbling out of the canal into which she and her bike have fallen, the frightened girl is forced to return home.
A few nights later, her attacker—this strange man, Jesus—returns the bike to her home. Angry but curious, Orla follows him. This is when she discovers where he lives, who he claims to be, and the supernatural powers he possesses. (view spoiler)[She spies on him as he restores dead birds and other animals to life and wholeness, using his breath and his blood. There’s a catch, though: once restored, the creatures must remain within his orbit. If they’re exposed to the sun, they are vaporized, returning to the Father’s light. (hide spoiler)] Having watched Jesus perform miracles, Orla decides that he needs to accompany her to Northern Ireland. (view spoiler)[She believes he can raise her mother from the dead. (hide spoiler)] A fair bit of the novel details the challenges of Orla and Jesus’s journey, which becomes nightmarishly strange.(view spoiler)[Along the way Jesus tries to deliver his message of love and kindness in a pub, ends up being told to return to Somalia or Pakistan or whatever foreign parts he’s from. He’s tossed out, badly beaten, and left for dead. Orla subsequently buries him, hoping he’ll rise again. The girl then attends a circus, arranges for the now newly risen Jesus to make a living there—performing resurrections as a sideshow act, and then rides off on an elephant. In the end, her father finds her and she agrees to go for counselling. (hide spoiler)]
I honestly cannot recall the last time I read such a weird book. When I began it, I wondered if I was getting a novelistic variation on the 1961 film Whistle Down the Wind in which three children discover a man in the family barn and believe him to be Jesus Christ. (He’s actually an escaped murderer.) Later, I wondered if the author was presenting a case of folie à deux, in which a grieving girl buys into the delusions of a schizophrenic man, possibly a refugee, claiming to be the Son of God. In the end, the only conclusion I could reach was that this was the story of a psychotic break.
The book ends very abruptly. I flipped ahead, thinking my digital advanced reading copy must be missing pages. Apparently not. I won’t lie: I was relieved. By that point, enough was enough.
I’m afraid I cannot recommend this novel. I’m surprised it was actually accepted for publication. Maybe I’m missing something. If someone figures out what that is, please let me know.
Thank you to Net Galley and the publisher for providing me with a free uncorrected proof for review....more
**spoiler alert** I was impressed enough with Unigwe’s On Black Sisters Street to be interested in reading more from this Nigerian-born author. He**spoiler alert** I was impressed enough with Unigwe’s On Black Sisters Street to be interested in reading more from this Nigerian-born author. Her new novel is quite different from that earlier one, though the two books have some common elements: three young women (this time actual sisters) as central characters and stories that focus on entrapment and abuse. Nani, the main character and eponymous middle daughter, is a teenager when the trouble begins. Her older sister, Udodi, away at university in the US, is killed in a car accident. Then, within a couple of years, her beloved father, Doda, dies from pancreatic cancer. Nani attributes all that subsequently befalls her to those original tragic losses.
Always a top student, she quickly falls behind in school and is no longer even able to imagine pursuing a medical education abroad. She also fails to remain emotionally connected to friends. Brisk and energetic Mother and Nani’s lively younger sister, Ugo, have moved on and re-engaged with life. They can neither understand Nani nor shake the almost mute girl out of melancholia. She spends afternoons sitting in the beautiful garden in front of the family’s spacious home in a gated community in Enugu, a predominantly Christian/Igbo city in southeastern Nigeria. The family is very well-to-do: Doda had an important civil service job and Mother has recently opened the highly lucrative “Rejoice Maternity Clinic.�(view spoiler)[It’s a hidden-in-plain-sight illegal business: Mother sells the unwanted babies of teenage girls to wealthy couples. (hide spoiler)]
Nani only learns the truth about her mother’s work from Ephraim, an extremely odd Cameroonian who befriends her. He’s willing to listen to her speak of the dead when no one else is. Bombastic and bizarre, he’s an itinerant evangelical preacher, who’s somehow gotten himself into the high-end neighbourhood to share the gospel. Nani has no romantic attraction to him—who could? His ludicrous “bamboozling� of his audience with “the sizableness of [his] vocabulary� coupled with his inability to pronounce the letter “l� make it hard to appreciate the threat he poses. By the time he tells Nani: “You make me a raffing stock,� and “I rove you . . . but you make me so angry,� we understand that he’s dangerous, but it’s still hard not to laugh. I think Unigwe should’ve thought twice about diluting this character’s malevolence with a speech impediment.
Most of the plot revolves around Ephraim’s “abduction� of Nani. He invites her to a Christian forgiveness vigil and when she misses curfew and won’t be able to re-enter her family’s compound, he suggests that she stay at his house. (view spoiler)[There he rapes and impregnates her. Later he’s Christian enough to forgive her for seducing him. (hide spoiler)]. Nani briefly returns home, but, unable to confide in her sister or mother (for whom the purity of her daughters is paramount) and growing increasingly distraught, she believes Ephraim to be the only one she can turn to. He offers her nothing but marriage “ordained by God,� followed by incarceration in the home, domestic abuse, and two more pregnancies.
The remainder of the novel concerns Nani’s efforts to get away from her captor. There’s a hitch, of course, and a big one: she needs to wrest her children from her husband. Nani’s sister, Ugo, has re-entered the picture at this point, just before fleeing to the US with Mother. The two will return to Nigeria when the investigation into Mother’s illicit business activities dies down. In the meantime, these two are urging Nani to come to the US without the kids.
I knew nothing about this book going into it. Partway through, apparently slow on the uptake, I happened to glance at a blurb on the back cover which, to my surprise, described it as a retelling of the myth of Persephone. I hadn’t made anything of Ephraim’s regular gifts of fruit; it was only when the flowers quite pointedly started dying off that I started to see any parallels. Nani can pass as Persephone, I suppose: she’s naïve and easily lured. She certainly lands in hell . . . but that’s where the parallels end. Ephraim seems an unlikely Hades—he’s too cartoonish� and by no stretch of the imagination is Nani’s mother a Demeter figure. Only at the end, does she mourn and mostly her own failure to assist. Her work—profiteering from teenage fertility—isn’t exactly Demeter’s either, but the business does take a nosedive after Nani’s marriage to Ephraim.
At about the halfway point, I thought Unigwe was just spinning her wheels, her novel mired in melodrama and going nowhere. It began to read like young-adult fare. Nani becomes a broken record. She cites Ephraim’s abuses ad nauseam and endlessly laments her mother’s lack of concern and failure to understand her middle daughter’s commitment to her children. It all becomes very tiresome. Part of the trouble is that Unigwe gives the reader no real reason to love these kids —offputtingly named Holy, PraiseHim, and Godsown by their father. This reader was certainly not invested in their story.
Unigwe’s book did begin with some promise. For one thing, it has an interesting structure. Most chapters are told from Nani’s first-person point of view, but there are some sections concerning the youngest sister, Ugo, which are written in the the third person. Other chapters are presented as a poetic chorus from the point of view of Udodi, the dead sister. These contain many lines in Igbo and sometimes make reference to myths I’m unfamiliar with. Having left the earthly plain, Udodi has a clear view of events but can do little more than make philosophical remarks about them.
In the end, the book bored me. I think a lot of the problem comes down to Ephraim. It’s not that I haven’t known pompous, righteous, and even emotionally abusive types; it’s that Unigwe hasn’t made him feel real. Come to think of it, none of the characters is particularly interesting or credible. I needed to believe in these people for the story to work, and I simply could not.
“Arriving in New York for the first time was like wearing a sign that said CHEAT ME.�
“What you see, she thought, is not what you get. What you see is “Arriving in New York for the first time was like wearing a sign that said CHEAT ME.�
“What you see, she thought, is not what you get. What you see is what you see.�
Rosoff’s novel, set in 1983, focuses on eighteen-year-old Beth, who comes to New York City after being selected for a prestigious summer internship at a large daily newspaper. Three other young people—preppy WASPish Oliver; ambitious “New Wave� Dan; and beautiful, unstable Edie Gale—have also won positions. Beth, the child of traumatized Holocaust survivors, is a dull sparrow compared to the worldly, stylish, and moneyed Edie, who is a different kind of Jew—one of the neurotic New York variety. Beth is flattered when Edie takes to her, tries to give her a makeover, and just generally shows her the way at both the newspaper and in the big city.
Rosoff’s narrative initially moves at quite a clip. There’s lots of snappy dialogue, some of it laugh-out-loud funny. However, the story becomes increasingly dark. Edie is a troubled, self-centred drama queen—and a nymphomaniac to boot. She’s been in therapy with Dr. Liebermann for years, but she hasn’t moved beyond blaming her psychological dysfunction on her harsh, controlling shrew of a mother. Beth learns all of this and more when she becomes feverishly, deliriously ill and Edie extracts her from the squalid apartment in Greenwich Village she’s sharing with a miserable young couple. Edie’s parents are away in the Hamptons for the summer and Beth is invited to live with her in rent-free, spacious, air-conditioned luxury. There’s a catch or two, of course. Beth is expected to be Edie’s audience and, over time, her minder. As her brilliant friend spirals out of control, Beth finds that her living arrangements and indeed her involvement with Edie are unmanageable.
This is a coming-of-age novel for mature young adults that is preceded by a warning about sexual content. There’s also a lot of drinking and drug use, and the AIDs epidemic looms menacingly in the background. The virus is no longer limited to young gay men; it’s beginning to affect women unaware of their partners� secret histories. The newspaper where Beth interns has recently hired two additional obituary writers, as the arts and creative communities are being decimated.
I found it puzzling that Beth was able to consume alcohol, often to great excess, at New York drinking establishments. She is, after all, barely eighteen. Edie is apparently of legal drinking age, nineteen, but we’re told several times that her appearance is childlike. At no point is either girl asked for ID. Perhaps this is par for the course in what is depicted as a dirty, chaotic, cut-throat city. Rosoff intimates that no one here much cares about anyone else. Bystanders and the police certainly don’t. (view spoiler)[One Saturday Beth is mugged at gunpoint while lined up with others to withdraw money at an ATM. Later, when she phones the police to notify them of the crime, they’re indifferent. Busy. Maybe she could come down to the station in a few hours? Or not. Similarly, there’s no interest when Beth phones to report that Edie has been missing for days. Picked up by a man at a bar? Yawn. The desk clerk has heard it all before. Beth’s friend is just off having a good time. (hide spoiler)]
Rosoff’s novel is propulsive, and I see her target audience being rewarded by it. Characterization is generally strong, even if I wasn’t entirely convinced by some of Beth’s actions, reactions, and decisions. The novel also takes too long to conclude and is a bit preachy about all the things Beth has supposedly learned. At the same time, it is true that in almost every life there really are brief, intense periods when a person is shaken up by a cascade of events. It can take months or years to reassemble oneself from the pieces that remain. For Beth, “What had begun as treachery had morphed into something else. She has been through fire and was stronger for it. Forged in the flame of a New York summer.�
A thank you to Net Galley and the publisher for providing me with a free advanced review digital copy of Rosoff’s book.
The “impossible thing� for me was persisting beyond three chapters. The humour is forced and remarkable only for its complete inability to inspire so The “impossible thing� for me was persisting beyond three chapters. The humour is forced and remarkable only for its complete inability to inspire so much as a smile. There was no indication that the book could move beyond intensely annoying and unfailingly dreadful. ...more
I regret to say that I did not get on with this oddly written, impressionistic work. I found the prose vague and off-putting, and I struggled to make I regret to say that I did not get on with this oddly written, impressionistic work. I found the prose vague and off-putting, and I struggled to make sense of it. Expecting a novel that would actually address the Siege Of Sarajevo, I was irritated by the endless fuzzy poetic rambling. The publisher misrepresented this book in the Net Galley description: “The Boy's Marble tells the story of experiencing a war through the eyes of a child.� As far as I got, there was no “story.� This appears to be an essentially plotless work, and I can’t imagine many completing it. ...more
Apparently a “semi-autobiographical novel,� A Woman reads less like fiction than a primary source, a rough memoir written in desperation, stowed away Apparently a “semi-autobiographical novel,� A Woman reads less like fiction than a primary source, a rough memoir written in desperation, stowed away in the back of old cabinet, and discovered years later by a descendant. It is not a refined piece of literature and, in Rosalind Delmar’s translation at least, it is frequently clunky. (I understand there’s a newer translation in a 2020 Penguin edition. I wonder if that version reads more fluently.) It is possible that the roughness was intentional—to create a sense of this being an authentic text. (view spoiler)[Near the end of the novel, the unnamed, perpetually distressed narrator indicates that the details of her life have been recorded for her son, from whom she has been separated. (hide spoiler)] The author has left all characters nameless, which makes for some awkwardness, and, since dialogue is also entirely lacking, there’s a kind of intense, oppressive tedium in the first-person narration.
The novel focuses on a young woman—beautiful and intellectually gifted, the eldest of four children, and the clear favourite of her charismatic but mercurial father, who has rejected religion for science. As a child, the main character idealizes the man. Modelling her behaviour on his, she feels a contempt similar to his for her mother, a pretty woman with no interests beyond the domestic sphere. The mother’s mental health deteriorates markedly when the family moves from Milan to the south coast of Italy, where the father has taken a job managing a new chemical factory. Previously, he’d worked as a science teacher and had also been employed in his brother-in-law’s business. No matter where he works, he ends up at loggerheads with someone.
Aleramo’s main interest lies in her protagonist’s disastrous marriage. Because the main character is so clever and there are no educational opportunities in the small working-class town, the fifteen-year-old is given accounting duties at the plant. The man she later marries works in the same office. Initially a friend she can talk to and flirt with, the young man begins with flattery and moves on to risqué remarks and opportunistic fondling of the girl. He has “a reputation� in town. One day he simply rapes her. Since her relationship with her mother is strained and she has received no instruction from her, the main character’s knowledge of sex has been derived from romance novels. Consequently, she does not know how to interpret the violation. In this southern Italian town, rape is accepted as a man’s way of staking his claim to a woman. After the sexual assault, the protagonist naively attempts to convince herself that she’s in love with her attacker. Once they marry, however, the fiction cannot be sustained. Given her violent sexual initiation, the young woman is disgusted by her husband and shamed by his regular use of her body. Unsurprisingly, then, she’s susceptible to sweet talk and emphatic declarations of love from a man she meets at a party. When her possessive husband gets wind of the flirtation, there’s even greater tension in the marriage. To say that it implodes in extreme domestic violence is an understatement.
The couple have produced a son to whom the young woman is deeply dedicated. The central problem for the heroine is that she’s desperate to escape the marriage but does not want to leave her child behind. Her intense suffering radically alters her perception of her mother. She exchanges rejection for deep sympathy, fully appreciating the tragedy of the older woman’s existence. (view spoiler)[After throwing herself from a balcony and surviving, the mother descends into severe mental illness and is committed to an insane asylum. The author seems to want us to believe the woman’s decline is situational, largely due to her unhappy marriage; however, the details provided suggest organic disease, possibly early-onset Alzheimer's. Later, the main character, seeing no escape from her own marital prison, also regularly contemplates ending her life, and, in fact, actually attempts suicide. (hide spoiler)]
Everything that happens in A Woman is filtered through the main character, whose development we follow from childhood into her late twenties or so. There are lengthy sections in which this character is attempting to see to her own intellectual education. She reads, processes sociological ideas, grows committed to feminism, produces letters and articles that are sent off to newspapers and journals, and eventually becomes a sub-editor at a woman’s magazine in Rome. Her opinions form a significant part of the text.
The protagonist endlessly grapples with the question of how a person—a female person—should be. How can a woman become a full human being when society offers her so few options and marriage is a form of life imprisonment? It’s not hard to understand why this book created a sensation in Italy in the earliest years of the twentieth century. I think it’s of considerable value as a cultural document, as it provides the reader with a sense of Italian women’s lives in the last years of the nineteenth century. Having said that, I did not find it an aesthetically pleasing or even an emotionally satisfying work. To me, the book felt much lengthier than it is. It’s also very claustrophobic, but I expect that’s the point. The reader is as much stuck in the main character’s head as the young woman is trapped by circumstance....more
Eight months after the death of their mother who is spoken of in hagiographic terms, three siblings in their early forties, their spouses aRating: 2.5
Eight months after the death of their mother who is spoken of in hagiographic terms, three siblings in their early forties, their spouses and young children gather at the upstate New York home of the middle son, Henry, and his wife, Alice. It’s Christmas, the first without their beloved Helen, who brought the group together and invariably smoothed out tensions. And tensions there are aplenty—internal, marital, and familial.
The youngest of the siblings, Kate, the one with the deepest attachment to Helen wants to move with her husband and three kids from Virginia to Florida into the home she and her brothers grew up in. Helen left no will, so for the time being the house is being rented. The siblings are to decide what to do about the place at this holiday gathering. A few years back, Kate and her husband could easily have bought out her siblings. Josh had a huge inheritance. Unfortunately, he’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer; he made some lousy investments in tech stocks and lost almost everything. Kate’s brothers and their wives don’t know about her family’s financial vicissitudes yet, but a couple of them have anticipated her request. Kate hopes she might somehow convince them all to give her the house. The main obstacle is Tess, her prickly sister-in-law, a workaholic New York City litigation lawyer.
Steger Strong skillfully takes the reader into minds of the six adults in this family, providing insights into their values, worries, and insecurities. The women’s concerns get far more airplay than the men’s. Another strand of the plot concerns a 23-year-old single mother, Quinn, and her six or seven-year-old child, the precocious Maddie. Quinn, a former heroin addict, had her child taken from her for a time by Child Welfare Services. Quinn was sent to rehab and then lived in a halfway house until she got her act together. Alice is the social worker assigned to Quinn and Maddie’s case. It’s a particularly tough one for her. Alice desperately wanted a child of her own, underwent extended fertility treatment, and had numerous miscarriages nevertheless.
The plot of the novel takes a fairly dramatic turn when Maddie goes missing during this holiday period. I’ll not say much about this, except to note that this is where I think the novel falters. Many pages are dedicated to Quinn, Alice, and Alice’s brothers-in-law traipsing through the woods, fearing that the child may have died of exposure. Meanwhile back at the house, Kate and Tess work on dinner, supervise the children, and draw closer over several glasses of wine.
I can tolerate play-by-play present-tense narration of characters� inner states—and I think Steger Strong does this beautifully in the first two thirds of the novel. But I draw the line when this technique is applied to document actions—the minute by minute progression of children’s activities, their squabbles, and the minutiae of meal-time behaviour, for example. There’s far too much of it in the last third.
I also found the conclusion of the novel cloying. What had been a convincing depiction of characters� internal and external conflicts devolved into the kind of domestic fiction I don’t enjoy: women preparing meals and intervening when their little “duckies� quarrel or become impatient. Some may find the novel’s finale heartwarming, and, to be clear, I am not averse to reading about people who experience a sense of unity with others or at least look past their differences, but the final scenes here were overdone. In particular, the last bit where everyone lies down to look at an art installation (recreating a previous experience orchestrated by the saintly Helen) just felt contrived.
I’m unlikely to look for the author’s other novels....more
**spoiler alert** While much might be made of this as an “abortion� novel, Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting is equally concerned with the plight of a well-t**spoiler alert** While much might be made of this as an “abortion� novel, Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting is equally concerned with the plight of a well-to-to-woman in an unhappy late-1950s marriage. Ruth Whiting is at loose ends now that her boys have returned to their prestigious private school. Her eldest child, 18-year-old Angela (the reason teenage Ruth had been compelled by her father to marry Rex Whiting) will soon return to Oxford, but the mother-daughter relationship is strained. Angela feels her mother has no interest in her, while Ruth retains a degree of resentment towards the child who set her life on a seemingly irrevocable course. Over the summer holiday, Ruth’s children have noticed she’s become a little barmy. They joke about it, but they are on to something. Underneath her conventional, gracious-hostess exterior, she’s fragmenting.
After seeing her sons off in London and before catching the train back to her well-appointed home in a quaint village on the outskirts of London, Ruth goes shopping. Among her purchases is a small cradle-shaped music box which plays the traditional English lullaby Goodbye Baby Bunting. Ruth tells herself that it’s for a neighbour’s young child, but she is unable to part with it. the music box is a potent symbol of her experience of empty-nest syndrome as well as of the abandonment she feels in the vulnerable-child part of her own psyche. Her husband, Rex Whiting, is a high-end dentist to celebrities, who stays in his London flat during the work week, ostensibly out of convenience, but actually because adultery is a whole lot easier to manage at a distance.
Ruth is just descending into nervous collapse when her daughter suddenly returns home from Oxford to announce she’s pregnant. The “boyfriend� (if you can call him that) is cut from the same boorish cloth as Rex, and Angela certainly does not want to marry him. She also doesn’t want her father to know anything about her situation, believing he’d yell up a righteously indignant storm and likely force her into marriage. Ruth and Angela tentatively bond as they try to obtain abortion services for Angela. Abortion is illegal in 1958.
I have no idea how well Ruth and Angela’s experience seeking abortion reflects that of actual English women in the mid-twentieth century, but the novel made me interested in finding out more.
To her credit, Mortimer provides a realistic conclusion. Mother and daughter have not become kindred spirits, but they share a secret, and Ruth has gained some confidence by competently helping her daughter to steer her life in a different direction from her own. Angela moves on.
“She was looking for a man named Arch Wilson and she was walking south-westward, alone, towards the middle of the country, with another fifty or sixty“She was looking for a man named Arch Wilson and she was walking south-westward, alone, towards the middle of the country, with another fifty or sixty miles to go.�
So opens H. E. Bates’s Hardyesque novel, set in a nineteenth-century shoemaking village in the rural Midlands. A young woman, the simple and pretty Bella Ford, a chamber maid at a seaside hotel, is hoodwinked by the gifts and promises of one of the summer guests and falls pregnant. During an arduous journey in stormy weather, she miscarries and vows to kill the caddish Wilson for ruining her. Once she reaches Nenweald, the place he’d identified as home, he’s nowhere to be found. No one knows of him. Ben Wainwright, the town lamplighter, a former drunk who’s found religion, takes pity on Bella. He brings her home to his family, which conveniently includes three sons (Con, Jedd, and Matty) and their sister, Nell—all around Bella’s age. What follows is a tale of three young men more or less vying for Bella’s affection. A sense of inevitability—fatalism—prevails, a must in a novel after Hardy. One cannot alter what the gods have ordained. While there is some tension in the matter of whom Bella will settle on, the reader knows it’s not going to end well, especially with a character like Con, the intense and impulsive eldest Wainwright son, who can’t be stopped once set on a course.
There are some lovely descriptions of the natural world in the novel, and Bates’s depiction of Bella’s “reawakening� after trauma is sensitively rendered. However, the reader is also required to suspend disbelief. Winters are bleak in this village. There’s little employment to come by, and the Wainwrights live hand to mouth during the darkest months of the year. It’s hard to credit they’d willingly keep on a stranger—especially one who contributes little or nothing. They can barely make do as it is, and there’s the additional (perennial) problem of Wainwright Senior’s going on a sudden “blinder”—as Bates puts it. Bella is not a particularly interesting character. Aside from the opening and closing of the novel, she’s a passive young woman, demonstrating little agency. Her affections bend towards whichever Wainwright son happens to be closest at any given moment. Bella experiences no internal conflict as to whom she should choose, and for large sections of the book, her early statement of intent about Arch Wilson appears to be forgotten.
I liked the book well enough, but in spite of the many elements reminiscent of Thomas Hardy’s later novels, the central character with her scant backstory and shallow interior life is not enough to compel....more
An interesting but not entirely successful novel that explores the relationship between two teenage sisters, one of whom, Jane, suffered from serious An interesting but not entirely successful novel that explores the relationship between two teenage sisters, one of whom, Jane, suffered from serious mental illness and recently died after being struck by a car. Griffin presents the points of view of the siblings in alternating chapters.
Although Jane was killed in the spring—and it is now summer—she has been unable to leave the earth. She lingers on in the place she loved best, the now derelict home of her deceased grandparents. The reader learns that Jane’s psychosis (elevated mood, delusions, and auditory hallucinations) first presented when, as a twelve-year-old, she went on a camping trip with her grandmother and grandfather. She believed that a fish her grandfather had caught, which they subsequently ate for supper, was trying to reassemble itself within her so that it could return to the lake. Since that time six years before, Jane had been on antipsychotics. The medication kept the worst of her symptoms at bay, but it failed to alter her sense of being out of step with the rest of the world.
Though a year younger than Jane, Lily Calvert has always felt like the older sister. She’s pretty, popular, and actively involved in school clubs. She also has a sensitive, steady boyfriend, Caleb, a classmate of Jane’s with his own unusual history. It wasn’t easy for Lily to grow up with Jane. In fact, the Calvert family’s existence essentially revolved around the older girl’s illness. Since her sister’s death, Lily has leaned heavily on Caleb, who (somewhat unconvincingly) has put his own life on hold to provide emotional support to her. (While his friends are almost all off to college in the fall, he’s made no post-secondary-school plans.) Lily has also been reluctant to attend parties and social gatherings since Jane’s death. It’s a small town; the family’s loss is known to most.
The big event of the novel occurs at a party held by a school classmate. It involves an exchange with another attendee which forces Lily to confront things she’s been hiding from herself.
The alternating points of view and lots of light dialogue keep the novel moving at a brisk pace. The subject matter is heavy, but Griffin’s book is not as dreary as one might expect. In part, this is because the author’s treatment of Lily’s bereavement is very superficial. Additionally, the denouement and resolution are far too quick and neat. Not a bad read, but not a particularly memorable one either....more
More a collection of linked short stories than a novel, this work of fiction provides the backstories of characters mentioned in Strout’s short, fragmMore a collection of linked short stories than a novel, this work of fiction provides the backstories of characters mentioned in Strout’s short, fragmentary novel My Name is Lucy Barton, the first in her “Amgash� series, named for the small Illinois town where the titular character grew up. That book mostly consists of conversations between the main character—a writer, who has a prolonged hospital stay after suffering complications from an appendectomy—and the mother she hasn’t seen in years, who’s come to New York City to be with her. The first novel also provides some details about Lucy and her siblings� impoverished, dysfunctional upbringing, but much is opaque; the writing rambles and occasionally verges on maudlin. I felt that the author was trying too hard to be profound about the human condition. I didn’t care for the book.
Strout does better in the second volume, Anything is Possible, though I admit to still having some reservations, especially about one character’s noble acceptance of the fiery destruction of his dairy farm. The reader is told that Tommy Guptill (who knew and cared about the child Lucy when he was later employed as the school janitor) believes that God was present during the blaze that took all but his family. For years afterwards, Tommy is convinced he received divine reassurance that all would be well, even as the cows he’d tended died in agony. (view spoiler)[Guptill and the reader both learn that the fire was due to an act of vandalism by Lucy Barton’s deranged father, a veteran of World War II and sufferer of extreme PTSD. (hide spoiler)] In another story, Angelina Mumford, a middle-aged woman with marital troubles, travels to Italy to see her mother who, four years earlier, left a marriage of fifty-one years for a much younger Italian. We learn that Angelina, her mother’s favourite child, was so named because Mary knew early on in the pregnancy that she was carrying “a little angel.� There’s more where that came from.
In the first Amgash book, one of the criticisms that chafes Strout’s writer protagonist—whom it’s hard not to see (at least in some regards) as Strout’s alter ego—is that Lucy is “too compassionate� towards her characters. I’m not sure that’s exactly my issue with Strout’s writing; it’s more a matter of unnuanced characterization and writing that is occasionally sentimental. I think the earliest stories in Anything is Possible also suffer from these weaknesses. Those towards the end of the collection are somewhat stronger. “Sister�, which concerns Lucy’s reunion with her siblings in Amgash after many years away, struck me as a slightly edgier narrative, more realistic and convincing. “Dottie’s Bed and Breakfast”—which focuses on Lucy’s cousin’s experience with an older well-to-do couple who stay at her guest house—is an accomplished consideration of class prejudice and a certain kind of conventional marriage.
Over the past few days, I’ve been reading Strout’s “Lucy� books for the first time as a lead-up to Oh, William! which is a 2022 Booker Prize nominee. Based on what I’ve experienced of the series so far, I think it’s inferior to Strout’s novels about Olive Kitteridge. The Amgash books are accessible, undemanding reads, but Lucy is a far less compelling character than the prickly Olive. Strout’s stories about the fictional writer and the people linked to her can be facile; they’re also too effusive for my taste. Maybe the third book in the series, the Booker nominee, will be different, but I’m doubtful....more
An odd book with a peculiar, quite childlike voice at times. Emotional, rather nebulous, occasionally irritating. I don’t really know what to make of An odd book with a peculiar, quite childlike voice at times. Emotional, rather nebulous, occasionally irritating. I don’t really know what to make of it....more
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