This book was very mindless, and I ended up skimming some of it. It was saved from a dismal 1 star by a fast-moving, if entirely silly, plot.
I supposThis book was very mindless, and I ended up skimming some of it. It was saved from a dismal 1 star by a fast-moving, if entirely silly, plot.
I suppose I am an old stick in the mud, but I hate historical fiction which is not historical in the least but just some 21st century projection back in time by an author too lazy to use Google. Although A Little Trickerie has as its seed the historical episode of the Maid of Leominster, it is riddled with factual anachronisms and errors (a lot of reference to trade with the Spice Islands or enjoying cocoa or a fad for Black trumpeters, all of which seem to fail to understand that 1500 to 1505, when the novel was set, was really early in the age of exploration and none of these were in England yet (well Black trumpeters? on a time machine from the jazz age?)), as well as the (to me) very annoying trait of character and atmospheric anachronism, where characters march around espousing world views that are straight from a 21st century Pride parade (among many other such things, one character, briefly a priest, expresses the idea that God is compassionate and kind and, despite the Church, would embrace the idea of same-sex love -all in 1505 England!) The theme of the triumph of the marginalized in the book (with a heaping amount of solidarity with gay people (all of whom want to marry) and even gratuitously a perhaps proto-trans cross dresser) finds its counterpoint in the portrayal of Henry VII's England as a brutally violent homophobic place obsessed with rooting out sodomy and punishing it violently (as well as with punishing religious fraud violently). This too is ahistorical, with homosexual acts not being officially criminalized until 1533 and prosecutions for the crime in the late Medieval period being relatively rare. Indeed, the tone of the violent vilified churchmen throughout seems more Puritan than late-Medieval Catholic. I could go on and on.
I am always disappointed when authors project on to their characters starkly 21st attitudes. It would be much more complex, and to my mind more interesting, to write about a love between two men in an era where being gay wasn't really a fixed identity as it is now, but much more fluid and related to acts themselves, and where the separation of the sexes in many spheres meant homosocial friendship was prized above all, even as physical acts had to be kept hidden.
Anyway, that clearly wasn't Pike's project. She wanted to write a fable about an early 16th Century girl-boss and her gay BFF and she did. She seeks to entertain and history is only a decoration, not a substance. Lots of people want novels to reflect themselves and their own attitudes and value a novel on whether it matches those values they see as correct. Clearly, this is true for a wide audience of readers, and so I should stop wanting history in my historical novels (not everyone can be Hilary Mantel!).
But even holding that aside, the writing substitutes hyphenated quirks for style (God is the "big-man" to give but one example used on nearly every page), as well as lots of profanity to tide over any lack of narrative art (and here again, clunky anachronism - did Medieval Britons curse, to be sure - and even used the F word, but did they say "I do not give a F?" as our characters do repeatedly, no they did not; same with F off (a 20th Century locution but a fave in this book) and "give two shits")).
I should stop already- it was a lame book - but a quick read and a kind of amusing plot if you suspend every form and fashion of disbelief!...more
I was very conflicted about this book, which is at least a 3.5. First, the writing was gorgeous. It's lush and rather overdone feeling, and that usualI was very conflicted about this book, which is at least a 3.5. First, the writing was gorgeous. It's lush and rather overdone feeling, and that usually annoys me, but then you realize that Ruane is actually layering her words into a great sense of place and atmosphere, with little punches of meaning. It's not just curlicues. Second, it's propulsive. Not much happens, but its rather unputdownable. I couldn't wait to get back to it each evening, staying up too late to finish it last night. Third, both the main characters, stuck in their mid 40s without the lives they might have wanted, are intriguing - Lydia is an ex member of a very briefly famous girl band, struggling with the residue of a lifetime's worth of MeToo moments with men in her professional and personal life, and Joyce is a gothic character from a Bette Davis movie, trapped in a terrifyingly twee tiny apartment with her all controlling mother who dresses them alike in the fashions of yesteryear. Where is this going? The blurb copy promises a fateful encounter between these two women in the vividly depicted crumbling seaside resort that is the book's setting.
Well, all that promise isn't quite realized. Lydia spins through a self-help book's worth of supposedly feminist cliches about agency, forgiveness, self-actualization, internalization and externalization of harm, all of them a bit tired, and many of them contradictory. The word "rape" is rather histrionically kept off stage, and we never learn, exactly, what happened in Lydia's worst relationship, why she remained involved with the guy for years, and why she seems determined to let him off scot-free, when the back drop to the book is the dominance of MeToo and the outing of abusers.
As for Joyce, she's more interesting, but at the end of the day, her story feels unfinished (the implausibility didn't bother me). There's no real encounter between the two women, and the supposedly seminal moment between them doesn't matter much, in the end.
So the whole ended up being less than the sum of the parts. And I shouldn't have read the acknowledgements, where the author castigates herself for a host of privileges, while managing to sound thoroughly whiny about the whole thing. It left a bad taste in my mouth, and the authorial intrusion actually made me like the book less than I had....more
Elizabeth Strout gets back on track with this one, which brings all her main characters together for a brief murder mystery and a meditation on late-mElizabeth Strout gets back on track with this one, which brings all her main characters together for a brief murder mystery and a meditation on late-middle-aged love. I enjoyed this after finding Lucy by the Sea pretty weak. I just love Olive Kitteredge and the Burgess boys are good characters too, though I find the likely somewhat autofiction Lucy in late-middle-age very annoying (it's a bit mysterious why everyone is always falling for her).
One beef: Strout's writing is full of repetition, both as a stylistic tic within the book and as a way of (continuously) recapping what happened in prior books. I suppose it's always a danger when writing a long series of interconnected novels over a period of many years when not all can be expected to remember all. But having listened to two Strouts back to back, I found myself tuning out from the audio from time to time, and not losing much because of it. This suggests to me that the books could be tighter.
Still, an enjoyable listen, even if it does all feel a bit familiar by now (how much adultery can there be in one small universe of people - don't answer that question!)....more
I liked this book much more than a 3 star rating may imply - it's really at least a 3.5. I enjoyed Fundamentally when the author was satirizing the cuI liked this book much more than a 3 star rating may imply - it's really at least a 3.5. I enjoyed Fundamentally when the author was satirizing the customs and foibles of international development work, of NGO's, the UN and diplomacy. The glimpses of an Iraq that most Americans stopped thinking about during the 2nd George W. Bush administration are fascinating. Younis is funny, too, and her skewering of the international aid worker types that our narrator, Nadia, finds herself working with is delightful, if broad, and deliciously unconstrained by the constraints of PC or wokeness or whatever we can call adherence to a certain repressive coding of speech and attitude (it's hard to critique that way of writing without sounding MAGA - anyway, Younis doesn't do it, whatever it is called).
Younis's plot is less successful. The story of Sara, and Nadia's gullibility (and willing to blow her entire career on her), felt sort of glued together, and the psychological backstory that supposedly explains it all is clunky. But I did enjoy Sara's attitude, and unwillingness to conform to Nadia's, or the reader's, pre-conceived notions about "redemption." You may also find yourself wincing at some of Younis's prose - she's not a natural craftswoman, to be sure.
That said, if Younis hadn't stepped out of her usual role as an (apparently) well-respected and well-credentialed policy and development wonk to write a novel, it is certain that non-fiction-avoidant me would never have learned anything about this corner of the world, or ISIS brides post-Isis, or any of it. So I thoroughly respect her for trying fiction and this book is not at all a waste of time....more
I had high hopes for this one which were unrealized. When I was a graduate student in Edinburgh, I got to know its Jewish community a bit, and met (anI had high hopes for this one which were unrealized. When I was a graduate student in Edinburgh, I got to know its Jewish community a bit, and met (and read the memoir of) the author’s father, David Daiches, a fascinating and wise man. I was hoping that this book would give me insight into that small close knit community that was at once both very Jewish and very Scottish.
But actually, this book doesn’t take place in the Edinburgh Jewish community at all and isn’t even very Jewish, apart from the opening scenes and a few passing references to Shabbat candles.
What it is is an incredibly sprawling family saga over 4 or 5 (to be honest I lost count) generations, tracing an extended family (the progeny of one Jewish woman and her Scottish lover, plus his brother and wife) as they march through 20th century history with some detours out of Scotland to Kenya, Israel, Canada and Bergen Belsen. It’s interesting base material but the family becomes so extensive with so many nieces and nephews and great nephews and great great grandchildren that at some point you can no longer really get invested in any of the characters. The emotions stay rather buttoned up and you don’t really feel like you get to know anyone that well.
There were also some editing glitches. Overall, a good effort but ended up reading a bit too much like a family tree and not emotionally gripping....more
I usually love Elizabeth Strout but this one didn't hit for me. It felt like filler between books of more substance, and a lot of recapping of charactI usually love Elizabeth Strout but this one didn't hit for me. It felt like filler between books of more substance, and a lot of recapping of characters we know from other books.
Also - and I'm going to try to capture the nuance of what I feel here - it took me back, perhaps too vividly, to the worst moments of the pandemic and the worst attitudes those moments brought out. I am not a Covid denialist: I was as careful as anyone in the early months, and I was hyper-vigilant about protecting my elderly parents, and making sure they were being as safe as possible, throughout. Unlike Lucy in this book, I stayed in New York for the first months and the reality in our city was horrific, to say the least. But I never liked the judgments - for not wearing a mask (I did), for socializing, for not washing your groceries (I never did). And Lucy and William have those judgments in force. Not only do they have those judgments, but given the handy all-controlling eye of fiction, if someone fails to follow their dicta, they promptly end up in the hospital, or die. Lucy's smug voice on these subjects (and on her trying to be empathetic but actually totally othering) view of the people who voted for our then and current President left a bad taste in mouth. Where we are right now is so terrible, I feel, that some of that sanctimony - which is clearly not Lucy's but Strout's - could have been put to better use.
Anyway, I'm going on to the next book, but I hope it is less ripped from the headlines and more quiet story telling, which is what Strout does best....more
This tale of marital abuse and economic precarity in Dublin earned my respect for the sharp air of unrelenting menace it cre3,5 with a debut bump up.
This tale of marital abuse and economic precarity in Dublin earned my respect for the sharp air of unrelenting menace it creates and holds through most of the novel. We don’t really know the details of why Ryan is so scary, but he is, and the reader feels the claustrophobic terror of Ciara’s existence on every page. And also the routine humiliations of poverty and homelessness- that everything could go terribly wrong at any minute.
The book fell down a bit towards the end for me when Ciara’s learned helplessness vis a vis the legal system became quite exasperating. Despite having a competent free lawyer, and having little problem getting a maintenance order or a barring order, she continues to let Ryan violate court orders and invade her space. But I’ve never experienced abuse, and that may well be true to life. And Ryan and his family are a bit too cartoonish to be real.
Nonetheless, the chilling atmosphere of everyday awfulness was more gripping than any thriller I’ve read this year. Kudos to the author for that
At first I was disappointed there wasn’t more plot, but Adichie just writes so well that these character studies of four different African born women,At first I was disappointed there wasn’t more plot, but Adichie just writes so well that these character studies of four different African born women, focusing on their interactions with men, and also, the United States, ended up sucking me in entirely. I loved all these characters, especially spiky morally complex Omelogor and Kadiatou, the only non-Nigerian and only working class woman. The send ups of American culture, particularly “liberal� academia, were also delicious. I hope we don’t have to wait 12 years for another novel!...more
I like a good family saga - and this is that, with the added bonus for those of us who don't know much more than a handful of headlines of being steepI like a good family saga - and this is that, with the added bonus for those of us who don't know much more than a handful of headlines of being steeped in Persian culture and 20th century Iranian history. I enjoyed meeting each of Mahloudji's Persian women - even the perpetually annoying Shirin (and the suite of audio narrators depicting each of them is excellent).
Where the novel slipped for me was pacing. The big reveal (not much of one) is a long time coming and then not much comes of it. A very little plot is an engine for a lot of book. The book's themes of bad and good motherhood and the relationship between wealth and purpose are worried at for a long time without much insight or resolution being provided.
Still a pleasant immersion and not too taxing chick lit that is a little smarter than most of that genre....more
Great premise - and a little too close for comfort - given the headlines. People, like our heroine, can be detained for things in their dreams and elsGreat premise - and a little too close for comfort - given the headlines. People, like our heroine, can be detained for things in their dreams and elsewhere that indicate that they will commit crimes, even if they haven't yet. Once detained, they are subject to byzantine and arbitrary rules in a grim for profit detention center where any effort to assert themselves can prolong their detention.
So far so good. Lalami sets up this world and ably crafts the details. But then the problem is that there is no plot. The various detainees have very lightly sketched characters (other than the narrator), and there are several episodes dropped in that seem like they will have a point (including, especially, the introduction of a 2nd narrator, but also the strange behavior of the lead most sadistic guard) but then don't. The novel moves at a snail's pace, and nothing really happens for most of it.
When the denouement comes, it doesn't really make sense given the logic of the novel or common sense, and it seems that after all that foot dragging, the novel just sort of ends with a clunk rather than wrapping up.
This is not an easy book to read because the protagonist is unredeemably dislikable and absolutely physically degraded as well, living in conditions oThis is not an easy book to read because the protagonist is unredeemably dislikable and absolutely physically degraded as well, living in conditions of vividly described squalor. Nonetheless, it is very well done and its few pages fly by. There appear to be lots of metaphors for South Africa’s brutal past and precarious present at work but it would take someone with more than my facile understanding of recent events there to unpack them. ...more
Aber is just an incredible writer- no surprise, I guess, she’s a poet, and the 5 stars are for that. The treatment of being an immigrant Afghan girl iAber is just an incredible writer- no surprise, I guess, she’s a poet, and the 5 stars are for that. The treatment of being an immigrant Afghan girl in Berlin - being betwixt and between everything- is just searing.
I don’t really like books where taking a lot of drugs is a central theme, not a morality thing, just a feeling that it’s not fun to read about. But, in this context, the matter of fact presentation of Berlin’s club scene (almost a character in itself) was ok and not overdone.
The abuse scenes are hard to read and I wanted perhaps a different emotional resolution to them, but Aber’s book felt very very real, even when that is uncomfortable....more
I hadn't even heard of Dorothy Whipple until a friend recommended her to me a couple of weeks ago, but I found this first foray into her writing an enI hadn't even heard of Dorothy Whipple until a friend recommended her to me a couple of weeks ago, but I found this first foray into her writing an entire delight. Writing in England in the 1930s, but depicting a milltown 20 years earlier, before, during and after WW1, Whipple has a keen eye for social caste and all its foibles and the pacing in this tale of an orphan shopgirl made good never lags.
I have seen Whipple compared to Austen, and there are certainly call-outs to Austen, such as a ball scene that skews the Austenian perspective to tragicomic effect, but there were also call outs to Dickens and Bronte (naming a hardworking bookish orphan who catches the eye of an adulterous aristrocrat "Jane" is no accident). Whipple may not take a place at the table of those greats, but her book is an honorable part of the tradition.
If I had a quibble, it's that I could have read an entire novel about Jane's career in fashion retail from lowly shop assistant to prosperous boutique owner, dealing with sexual harassment, late paying customers, and all the like. The central romance plot was less interesting to me, and threatens to veer towards the overwrought, but I think Whipple pulled it off in the end. ...more
Hey, Manguso can write. A style made up of telling details, close clipped, no flab anywhere. It's effective. That aspect of the book is very impressivHey, Manguso can write. A style made up of telling details, close clipped, no flab anywhere. It's effective. That aspect of the book is very impressive.
But I guess I got tired of her project long before she did. This is a loonnggg minute catalog of the sins of a really terrible thoughtless rude manipulative narcissistic boyfriend and then husband. The "Liars" in the project implies that there is more than one liar here, and that our saintly long-suffering loving horny domestic goddess/successful writer of a narrator is maybe not telling it like it is. However, the book doesn't contain any overt hints that that's the case. Rather, our narrator is downtrodden and put upon but still getting it all done, and if she has a flaw, it's staying with him long past the point of all reason, after a whole flag factory of red flags has been dumped on her head.
I'm not sure what, some 60 years after the Feminine Mystique, is insightful about the observation that women bear an unequal burden of domestic labor. Is anyone surprised by that? And by making the husband such a caricature Manguso blunts the impact of anything she might be trying to get us to take away from the novel. I suspect most readers breathe a sigh of relief thinking, well, my partner's not a monster like that.
Again, a tribute to the writing that I stuck with a subject matter i really didn't care for at all....more
I think this is a 3.5 or 3.75. I enjoyed the wacky energy throughout - the first part, especially, with the drive across country that wasn’t and the mI think this is a 3.5 or 3.75. I enjoyed the wacky energy throughout - the first part, especially, with the drive across country that wasn’t and the motel redecoration, was off-the-wall enough to break through quirk and be truly interesting. I appreciated the author wrestling with perimenopause and menopause and the meaning of both of them. I lead nowhere near as interesting a life as July, or her narrator, but I remember that mid-40s storm before the calm well, and recognize it in many of my friends.
But I got tired of our narrator and her vividly described sex life before she got tired of herself, or July tired of her. This was the 3rd a little too autobiographical novel I read in row (Martyr! and Liars being the other two) where the author was a little too enamored with their self-similar creation and went on a bit past the point of welcome.
Finally, NY Magazine and the like are trying to make me believe that some people are reading this book as advice or a manifesto - that they are taking its advice to blow up monogamy in middle age. People should do what they want to do, and I'm certainly not out here carrying a torch for sticking in a stultifying marriage, but do not take life advice from this intentionally uber-messy book where the narrator only remotely gets what she wants in a tacked-on coda and spends the entire book badly misreading people and falling apart. Our narrator is solipsistic, a fantasist, a mis-intrepreter - all by design - she's not anyone's guide to later life....more
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