Think of Alexandra Kleeman as an heir to Dave Eggers and Douglas Coupland, with a hefty dollop of Margaret Atwood thrown in. Her first novel is a fullThink of Alexandra Kleeman as an heir to Dave Eggers and Douglas Coupland, with a hefty dollop of Margaret Atwood thrown in. Her first novel is a full-on postmodern satire bursting with biting commentary on consumerism and conformity. Television and shopping are the twin symbolic pillars of a book about the commodification of the body. In a culture of self-alienation where we buy things we don’t need, have no idea where food comes from and desperately keep up the façade of normalcy, Kleeman’s is a fresh voice advocating the true sanity of individuality. Don’t miss her incredible debut.
(4.5) I haven’t read Mary Karr’s memoirs, but I certainly will after reading her masterful survey of memoirs old and new. During her Texas upbringing (4.5) I haven’t read Mary Karr’s memoirs, but I certainly will after reading her masterful survey of memoirs old and new. During her Texas upbringing full of alcoholism and abuse, “a first-person coming-of-age story, putatively true, never failed to give the child me hope that I could someday grow up and get out of the mess I was in ... Every memoirist had lived to tell the tale.� Over the last decade memoirs have rapidly become one of my favorite genres. I read them for a cathartic effect similar to what Karr describes, but also out of sheer curiosity: how have other people found purpose in and made sense of their daily lives? No matter the outward differences between us, I can sense a deep parity between myself and almost any autobiographical writer.
I would recommend this book to anyone who reads and/or secretly wants to write memoirs; for the latter group, there is a wealth of practical advice here, on topics such as choosing the right carnal details (not sexual � or not only sexual � but physicality generally), correcting your facts and misconceptions, figuring out a structure, and settling on your voice. Along the way Karr discusses a number of favorite memoirs in detail, sometimes even line by line: Wild by Cheryl Strayed, Stop-Time by Frank Conroy, A Childhood by Harry Crews, Maya Angelou’s books, Speak, Memory by Nabokov, and so on. Plus there’s an appendix of recommended reading that looks like an incredible resource and will surely bloat my TBR even further.
This is a very readable and quotable book: Karr has been teaching memoirs at Syracuse University for years now, so she’s thought deeply about what makes them work (or not), and sets her theories out clearly for readers at any level of familiarity. Here’s one quote, from the very end of the book, in which she gives us an idea of how important memoirs can be:
I still feel awe for us ... for the great courage all of us show in trying to wring some truth from the godawful mess of a single life. To bring oneself to others makes the whole planet less lonely. The nobility of everybody trying boggles the mind. ... None of us can ever know the value of our lives, or how our separate and silent scribbling may add to the amenity of the world, if only by how radically it changes us, one and by one.
This collection of tightly linked short stories, an intimate look at Russia and Chechnya in wartime and afterwards, reveals how politics, family, and This collection of tightly linked short stories, an intimate look at Russia and Chechnya in wartime and afterwards, reveals how politics, family, and art intertwine. Ranging from 1937 to 2013, the pieces show how fear and propaganda linger in the post-Stalinist era. In art as much as in politics, it can be difficult to distinguish airbrushed history from bitter reality. Just as he did in his excellent debut novel, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, Marra renders unspeakable tragedies bearable because of his warm and witty writing. All his characters� voices are well-realized and inviting, and he comes up with terrific one-liners.
(Non-subscribers can read an excerpt of my full review at .) ...more
(Nearly 4.5) This is just as good as The Paris Wife � if not better. I didn’t think I was very interested in aviatrix Beryl Markham, but McLain pr(Nearly 4.5) This is just as good as The Paris Wife � if not better. I didn’t think I was very interested in aviatrix Beryl Markham, but McLain proved me wrong. What a life story, and what terrific storytelling to do it justice. Before she ever thought of flying solo across the Atlantic, she was just Beryl Clutterbuck, raised in Kenya by her father in the 1900s�10s. She became one of Africa’s first female horse trainers, and its first professional female pilot. McLain describes her African settings beautifully, and a delicious love triangle between her, Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen) and Denys Finch Hatton forms the kernel of the book.
(See my full review at .)
Related reading: There’s a (very) short story about Beryl Markham in Almost Famous Women by Megan Mayhew Bergman....more
(Nearly 4.5) Gold, fame, citrus: reasons people once came to California. Now, only a desperate remnant remains in this waterless wasteland. Luz and Ra(Nearly 4.5) Gold, fame, citrus: reasons people once came to California. Now, only a desperate remnant remains in this waterless wasteland. Luz and Ray squat in a starlet’s abandoned mansion and live off of Luz’s modeling money � she was once the environmental movement’s poster child, “Baby Dunn.� When they take charge of a baby called Ig, however, their priorities change. They set off for the strangely beautiful sea of dunes, the Amargosa, leaving behind the ‘frying pan� of exposure to the elements for the ‘fire� of a desert cult.
There is some absolutely beautiful prose in this novel, only overblown in a handful of places, and Watkins experiments with a few different formats including a fantastical bestiary and what look like lines from a play. With an abandoned mall and a theater as notable settings, this reminded me of Station Eleven. All told, this is the book that California (by Edan Lepucki) wanted to be. It’s a smart, believable dystopian with a family at its heart. I didn’t think Watkins followed the environmental message through to its fullest possible extent, but I still think this compares favorably with books like The Road and the Maddaddam trilogy.
Fun fact: I’m pretty sure the nuclear waste monument in the desert bears lines borrowed/adapted from Jonathan Miles’s novel Want Not!
A few favorite passages:
Everything here was ash. Chalkdust and filament. Everything here could be obliterated with a wave of her hand.
She and Ig and John Muir were slate blue and sea green. They were a tuft of moss in Yosemite before Yosemite was a dry, ruined chasm ringed by hot granite knobs. They were a spray of fungi leaning out over Crater Lake before it went entirely crater. They were lichen on stone, dormant beneath the snowpack of a hangnail glacier in a crook of the Cascades that no one knew the name of.
we fill our homes with macabre altars to the live things we’ve murdered—the floral print of the twin mattress in her childhood bedroom, stripped of its sheets when she soiled them; ferns on throw pillows coated in formaldehyde; poppies on petrochemical dinner plates; boxes and bags of bulk pulpstuffs emblazoned with plant imagery the way milk cartons are emblazoned with children. A rock on a window ledge, cut flowers stabbed in a vase, wreath of sprigs nailed to the front door—every house a mausoleum, every house a wax museum.
(Nearly 4.5) An incisive study of a marriage, beautifully written and rich with allusions to Shakespeare and Greek mythology. Short, verbless sentence(Nearly 4.5) An incisive study of a marriage, beautifully written and rich with allusions to Shakespeare and Greek mythology. Short, verbless sentences pile up to create exquisite descriptions, as in “Sunset. House on the dunes like a sun-tossed conch. Pelicans thumb-tacked in the wind.� However, I was less sure about the necessity of the bracketed phrases, which seem to represent a Greek chorus giving omniscient commentary, and the use of slang and nicknames can grate.
Early chapters reminded me of The Art of Fielding and The Marriage Plot (the college years), or even in places of Swamplandia! (Lotto’s Florida upbringing), but Fates and Furies remains an achievement all its own. Groff makes it onto a short list of women I expect to produce the Great American Novel (along with Curtis Sittenfeld, Jennifer Egan, and Hanya Yanagihara).
Eva: “You don’t really believe that anything is meant to happen, do you?� Jim: “No. Maybe not. Who knows?� “No regrets, Jim, all right?� “No regrets, EvaEva: “You don’t really believe that anything is meant to happen, do you?� Jim: “No. Maybe not. Who knows?� “No regrets, Jim, all right?� “No regrets, Eva. Not now. Not ever.�
(Nearly 4.5) In this impressively structured, elegantly written debut, Barnett chronicles the romantic lives of two Cambridge graduates through three-quarters of a century. By giving three options for how their connection might play out, she investigates “the dim, liminal place where one path is taken, and another missed.� She juggles her storylines and moves through decades with ease.
The high-culture vibe is reminiscent of television’s Mad Men in places, and also recalls the sophistication of Maggie O’Farrell’s The Hand That First Held Mine. Less mawkish than One Day; less gimmicky than Life After Life � though there are shades of both. The message seems to be: there is no one perfect person, no one perfect story. Unsentimental this may be, but it feels true to how life works.
(Full review in July 2015 issue of Third Way magazine.) ...more
But then, more than two decades later, Louise kept coming back during the difficult year that forms the kernel of the memoir, a year in which Cohen’s younger daughter, Eliana, had a leg-lengthening surgery; her adopted older daughter, Julia, met her birth mother, Zoe; and Cohen herself underwent a lumpectomy and radiation for breast cancer. During radiation sessions, when she had to lie face-down, perfectly still, for 10 minutes at a time, her mother would appear and talk to her, mostly reassuring her that she was doing a good enough job. “I’m acclimating to the sufficiency of imperfection, settling for being adequate, which is not so bad, in the scheme of things. My mother taught me that. She’s still teaching me that.�
Louise was a raving liberal, a feminist who took her daughters on antiwar protests and staged a sit-on on rich folks� private beach. She completed a master’s thesis on inequalities in housing and spent years on a never-finished PhD. The duties of a household, even including motherhood, often seemed like nothing but roadblocks: �The dishes. The dishes! The goddamn dishes! No wonder women don’t succeed,� she once exploded. (My favorite lines of the whole book!)
“I am a magnet for medical ironies,� Cohen laments, and a first was that she hit puberty and developed large breasts just at the time her mother had a radical mastectomy to remove hers. This may well have been the initial source of their friction. Female organs and hormones connect past and present in Cohen’s family, even as they cause complications. The synthetic estrogen Louise took to prevent miscarriages increased her risk of breast cancer and infertility, two curses transmitted to Alice. Doctors told her she would never get pregnant, thus she and her husband adopted; years later she had a surprise pregnancy and, perhaps because of having been on HRT for 14 years, her daughter was born with one leg several inches shorter than the other. “I bet I’m the only woman in history...to have sued for both infertility and fertility,� Cohen exclaims. “Oh, God, how I wish my multigenerational maternal legacy didn’t have such painful symmetries.�
Wry and heartfelt, this is a wonderful memoir about motherhood in all its variations and complexities. The magic realism is an added delight. Whatever your relationship, past or present, with your mother, this would be a fun one to read as Mother’s Day approaches.
This new classic of nature writing zeroes in on the language we use to talk about our environment, both individual words � which Macfarlane celebratesThis new classic of nature writing zeroes in on the language we use to talk about our environment, both individual words � which Macfarlane celebrates in nine mini-glossaries alternating with the prose chapters � and the narratives we build around places, via discussions of the work of nature writers he admires, including John Muir, Barry Lopez, Nan Shepherd, J.A. Baker, and Roger Deakin (a personal friend for whom he served as literary executor).
The book is divided into rough geological categories: mountains, woodlands, coasts, and so on. For each landscape, he chooses a patron saint whose written works have influenced how he relates to it. To start with I was unsure the glossary sections belonged, but I came around to them. They are like rests in a piece of music. Whether poetic (“heavengravel,� Gerard Manley Hopkins’s term for hailstones), local and folksy (“wonty-tump,� a Herefordshire word for a molehill), or onomatopoeic (on Exmoor, “zwer� is the sound of partridges taking off), these vocabulary words are a treasure trove....more
(Nearly 4.5) One of my favorite debuts of 2015. From my Bookmarks review: Stradal has revealed that his grandmother’s Lutheran church cookbook was the(Nearly 4.5) One of my favorite debuts of 2015. From my Bookmarks review: Stradal has revealed that his grandmother’s Lutheran church cookbook was the inspiration for this culinary-themed novel that takes place over the course of 30 years. His unique structure takes what are essentially short stories from different perspectives and time periods and links them loosely through Eva Thorvald, an intriguing character who remains hard to pin down. Eva’s pop-up supper club gains fame thanks to her innovative adaptations of traditional Midwestern foods like venison or Scandinavian lutefisk; it charges $5,000 a head. Yet this is “not only Eva’s story but also a gastronomic portrait of a region� (New York Times Book Review).
For me the best chapter was “Bars,� but it’s not the only one in which Stradal cleverly denies the fairytale ending readers might be expecting. I, at least, thought traditional home cook Pat Prager should trounce all those hipsters and their vegan/gluten-free/celiac/raw baked goods at the bake-off and go on to culinary stardom. What actually happens is rather different, though the time lapse between chapters means you get to fill in some of the intervening plot for yourself. I loved almost all of Stradal’s ordinary, flawed characters. If you want a peek at how average Americans live (apart from the $5,000 meals), you’ll find it here.
(Quick marketing question that I ask out of curiosity: how do you think the decision was made to pass this off as a novel, but Anthony Marra’s The Tsar of Love and Techno as “Stories�? Although Eva appears in some way in each of the chapters here, it can sometimes be like a game of Where’s Waldo/Wally � how will she turn up now? By contrast, Marra’s stories are more closely linked. Perhaps the difference is simply that his chapters are not chronological?)...more
This pitch-perfect debut novel is an inside look at the Yugoslavian Civil War and its aftermath, from the perspective of a young girl caught up in theThis pitch-perfect debut novel is an inside look at the Yugoslavian Civil War and its aftermath, from the perspective of a young girl caught up in the fighting. The careful structure is what keeps it from becoming just another ordinary, chronological war story. The recreation of a child’s perspective on the horrors of war is stunning. In fact, I can barely think of a negative thing to say about this concise novel. It strikes a perfect balance between past and present, tragic and hopeful.
(Non-subscribers can read an excerpt of my full review at .)...more
(Nearly 4.5) Gritty and virtuosic, this novel-in-13-stories imagines 250 years of history on a set of islands off the coast of Virginia. As a Maryland(Nearly 4.5) Gritty and virtuosic, this novel-in-13-stories imagines 250 years of history on a set of islands off the coast of Virginia. As a Maryland native, I think of Chincoteague and Assateague as vacation destinations, but Taylor definitely focuses on their dark side here: industrial-scale chicken farms, unwanted pregnancies, domestic violence, bootleg liquor, gang rape, murders and meth labs. There’s a core of narratives set in the 1980s�90s that could easily form a novel on their own, but these are interspersed with vignettes stretching from 1876 to 2143. Dirty realism thus shares space with historical fiction and dystopia, while first-person narration (about one-third) trades off with third-person (nearly two-thirds) and one instance of the second person (“Boys�).
My favorite of the stories were the nineteenth-century ones about Medora, a half-Native American healer. These have a faint flavor of Wide Sargasso Sea, while there are traces of Ron Rash and David Vann in the rest. Taylor has proven here that she can do it all: contemporary realism, period research, even post-apocalyptic. Each of those genres could have spawned an entire book, but when crammed together they seem a bit show-offy, or like Taylor couldn’t make up her mind what she wanted the book to be. I also thought the 1980s�90s chapters were repetitive, with young women getting knocked up by dubious boyfriends.
Is The Shore short stories or a novel? That’s a question I’m still asking myself. I’ve heard Taylor’s approach compared to David Mitchell’s in Cloud Atlas or The Bone Clocks, but I haven’t read either (anyone who has, feel free to let me know how Taylor measures up). The compromise position says it’s linked short stories (like Snow in May by Kseniya Melnik, Unforgettable by Paulette Alden, or Archangel by Andrea Barrett), with characters and/or their ancestors/descendants showing up in later chapters. I think in the end I would have preferred a clearer choice: either a chronological novel or a straight set of short stories.
Still, there’s no denying that Taylor can write, and I loved tracing the history of some dying communities that are more than just names to me. Every region needs a literary chronicler, and I reckon Taylor is it for the Eastern Shore of Maryland and Virginia’s islands. This was certainly a deserving entry on the 2015 Baileys Prize longlist. Next time, though, I hope she’ll commit to one genre or style....more
(Nearly 4.5) Part 1 may be tedious, but from Part 2 onwards, I found this immersive, even action-packed (hey, there’s a murder and a suicide!). Perhap(Nearly 4.5) Part 1 may be tedious, but from Part 2 onwards, I found this immersive, even action-packed (hey, there’s a murder and a suicide!). Perhaps Franzen could have structured the narrative differently by starting with Andreas and then moving to Purity? By starting and ending with Purity ‘Pip� Tyler, however, he emphasizes his debt to Dickens: shades of both Bleak House and Great Expectations are there in the discovery of true parentage and unexpected riches, and I also spotted an echo of the latter in the inconclusive but cautiously optimistic ending line. My favorite part, though, is “le1o9n8a0rd�: the longest section and the only one in the first person, it’s Tom’s memoir of his ex-wife, Anabel.
As per usual with Franzen, the novel repeats the title phrase and variations thereof as often as possible, with multiple meanings teased out: it’s a main character’s name, but also the virtue (“She was horribly poor but her sheets were clean; she was rich in cleanliness�; “nougat cores of innocence�), a state of totality (“purely�), and so on. It’s perhaps not quite as successful as the term “freedom� in this respect, but overall I think the novel matches its predecessor.
Despite Franzen’s legendary technophobia, he generally gets it right with Andreas Wolf (an East German whistleblower with similarities to Assange and Snowden, though both are also referenced by name here) and his Project Sunlight:
it seemed as if the Internet was governed more by fear: the fear of unpopularity and uncoolness, the fear of missing out, the fear of being flamed or forgotten.
He was so immersed and implicated in the Internet, so enmeshed in its totalitarianism, that his online existence was coming to some realer than his physical self.
But, at the same time, “Nature even on the most local of scales made a mockery of information technology.�
His observations regarding journalism are spot-on, too:
Reporting was imitation life, imitation expertise, imitation worldliness, imitation intimacy; mastering a subject only to forget it, befriending people only to drop them. And yet, like so many imitative pleasures, it was highly addictive.
The truth is somewhere in the tension between the two sides, and that’s where the journalist is supposed to live, in that tension.
Purity is strong on the level of character and theme. Secrecy, isolation and compassion are recurring topics. I also enjoyed seeing how a codependent relationship with a mother is often repeated with a lover (e.g. for Tom, Clelia -> Leila). Names in general are interesting to trace, like Tom Aberant (= Aberrant?) and the close echoes of Andreas, Annagret and Anabel. Rather alarmingly, I could see a lot of myself in Anabel, especially her hermit tendencies and her sensitivity to smell. Franzen gets a lot of stick for his unpleasant characters, but I find them true to life and memorable.
East Germany, Bolivia and Oakland, California: Franzen doesn’t quite pull all his settings and storylines together, but this is close. With a more dynamic opening section, it might have been a 5-star read....more
(Nearly 4.5) Jill Alexander Essbaum’s arresting debut novel reads like a modern retelling of Madame Bovary, with its main character a desperate housew(Nearly 4.5) Jill Alexander Essbaum’s arresting debut novel reads like a modern retelling of Madame Bovary, with its main character a desperate housewife in Zurich. (I enjoyed this she offers of the novel’s settings.)
American expat Anna Benz has no cause to complain about life. Her banker husband Bruno provides for her needs and she has three beloved children. Still, Anna has never felt at home despite nine years in Switzerland. She is virtually friendless and can hardly communicate; only now has she signed up for her first German class. Depressed and lonely, she embarks on affairs with strangers and acquaintances. They meet in the men’s apartments, in hotel rooms, even in a forest hut. �Adultery is alarmingly easy,� Anna thinks. Yet for all this physical contact � described in explicit language � she remains utterly isolated.
The novel takes place over two momentous months but moves back and forth in time to cover the two-year span of Anna’s infidelities. Though told in the third person, it incorporates her thoughts, memories, and therapy sessions with Doktor Messerli. Anna asks life’s big questions: What is the purpose of pain? Is everything predestined? Yet she cannot stop her secrets from impinging on her family, with disastrous consequences.
Essbaum shows how grammar imposes guidelines as rigid as those of conventional morality and contrasts the stereotypical coldness of the Swiss with the flames of passion. As deplorable as Anna’s actions may be, she is an entirely sympathetic tragic heroine. Watch her trajectory with horror, but you cannot deny there is a little of Anna in you....more
My nonfiction book of the year. I read a lot of memoirs about illness and death, perhaps because I feel they get me closer to the heart of what matterMy nonfiction book of the year. I read a lot of memoirs about illness and death, perhaps because I feel they get me closer to the heart of what matters in life. Especially after my sister lost her husband earlier this year, I have been returning to bereavement memoirs as I think about books that might be therapeutic for her. If you enjoyed Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, this is a great follow-up. It joins Heaven’s Coast by Mark Doty, The Iceberg by Marion Coutts, and To Travel Hopefully by Christopher Rush on my short list of favorite reflections on the loss of a partner.
You might remember Alexander from the 2009 Obama inauguration, for which she wrote and recited the poem “Praise Song for the Day.� I hadn’t heard of her, but the subject matter of this memoir appealed to me. Why read about the sudden death of her husband Ficre in a cardiac event at age 50? There’s a simple reason: this is a gorgeous book, written with incredible warmth and candor; it is full of both remembering and imagining.
Alexander met her husband, Ficre Ghebreyesus, an Eritrean chef and painter, in New York City. They had a whirlwind courtship and were expecting their first son when they married. Life took them to Connecticut, where Alexander still teaches at Yale. Ficre referred to himself as a “conscious synchretizer� of different identities and cultures: African, but with European influences � he spoke Italian and had family there; African-American, but with wry detachment from his wife’s “Negro� roots. The astonishing fact was that English was his fourth language, but the one in which he conducted daily life.
They had lived in their cozy New Haven home, where Ficre cooked Italian-inspired feasts and had his morning cigarette and coffee out in the backyard he lovingly tended, for two years when he died of a massive heart attack. It was just a matter of days after his fiftieth birthday; he had been running on the treadmill in the basement. Their younger son found him, and in the time between Alexander calling an ambulance and paramedics arriving she saw Ficre’s soul leaving. Never mind that doctors said he was dead before he ever hit the ground.
This book is the most wonderful love letter you could imagine, and no less beautiful for its bittersweet nature. Through Alexander’s language I felt I knew Ficre and I, too, mourned his loss.
“He who believed in the lottery...He who never met a child he didn’t enchant. He who loved to wear the color pink�
“he himself was a profoundly peaceful and peace-loving person, forged in the crucible of war�
“He understood that ars longa, vita brevis, no matter when you die.�
There is Ficre, but there is also Lizzie, the grieving widow. The book is to celebrate the one who is gone, but also to chronicle how the one who remains goes on.
“I write to fix him in place, to pass time in his company, to make sure I remember, even though I know I will never forget.�
“I look across at his side of the bed as I wake with my mind racing with quandaries and I think, I miss my friend, plain and simple.�
“What a profound mystery it is to me, the vibrancy of presence, the realness of it, and then, gone. Ficre not at the kitchen table seems impossible.�
In short vignettes, beginning afresh with every chapter, Alexander conjures up the life she lived with and after Ficre. She circles back to his last days again and again, looking for the signs that would have told her what was coming. In tears and in dreams, she still feels her husband’s presence, yet “what is left of Ficre has a different form now. It is less sharp, more permeating, more essence, more distilled. It is less his body here, his body there, and more, he is the ground beneath us and the air we breathe.�
If you were wondering what the title means, it’s not Jesus who is the light of the world here; it’s beauty, as in the Derek Walcott line used as an epigraph. Although they married in a Greek Orthodox church, the closest thing they could find to Ficre’s Coptic tradition, Alexander is only a nominal Christian. You might say that beauty was their true religion; words, food and art formed their shared rituals. There are even recipes here: for Ficre’s famous shrimp barka and spicy red lentils; for a friend’s comforting spaghetti with onions.
This is my favorite nonfiction of the year so far. Whether you’ve suffered the recent death of a loved one or not, there is a memento mori message here for everyone. As Alexander quotes from the Bill T. Jones dance Last Night on Earth, “Are you doing what you want to do right? Have you located your passion as if this was your last night on earth?�...more
Hey Jude, don’t make it bad / Take a sad song and make it better *
Jude St. Francis: Dickensian orphan, patron saint of lost causes, Christlike ManHey Jude, don’t make it bad / Take a sad song and make it better *
Jude St. Francis: Dickensian orphan, patron saint of lost causes, Christlike Man of Sorrows, and one of the most memorable characters in recent fiction. His body is riddled with disease and cross-hatched with scars from years of physical and sexual abuse as well as subsequent self-harm. The reading experience might have been unbearable due to his suffering, but Yanagihara’s skill keeps you reading: the narration is matter-of-fact and revelation of Jude’s past is incremental, so distressing flashbacks are punctuated with more innocuous events.
There is nothing ‘little� about this book or the life portrayed. The novel is an attempt to tackle the monolithic question of what makes life worth living. Among the potential answers: love (though it doesn’t conquer all), friendship, creativity, and the family you create for yourself.
Sure to be one of the books of the year, if not the decade. See my full review (with a discussion of the American vs. British covers) at .
*I cite these “Hey Jude� lyrics somewhat ironically because Yanagihara’s very intention (view spoiler)[(as stated in this ) was to portray a character who does not get better. [My alternate, more apposite listening suggestion would be Carrie & Lowell by Sufjan Stevens.] Although I suspected early on (perhaps around page 200) that this was going to be a posthumous account of Jude’s life that comes out after his suicide, I kept wishing for a happy ending � oh how I wish the book could have ended on Part VI’s hopeful tone! At the very least, someone could have gotten Jude a puppy. (hide spoiler)]
Related reading:
� I reviewed Yanagihara’s debut novel The People in the Trees for We Love This Book in 2013 and admired it, but with rather mixed feelings. However, you can see the seeds of A Little Life in its pedophilia theme. � Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding has a similar focus on homosocial and homoerotic bonds.
Recommended articles:
� “The Great Gay Novel Might Be Here� on [SPOILERS] � Yanagihara’s eye-opening account of on Vulture [again, SPOILERS] � A between Yanagihara and her editor, Gerry Howard, on Slate.com (he thinks of the book as a “miserabilist epic�) & one more in the spoiler section above....more
Kiefer’s second novel contrasts wildness and civilization through the story of a man who runs an animal refuge to escape from his criminal past. “WhatKiefer’s second novel contrasts wildness and civilization through the story of a man who runs an animal refuge to escape from his criminal past. “What you have come for is death.� The second-person address and sobering message make for a jolting start. A gritty opening sequence establishes themes that will be essential to the novel: the fine line between instincts and decisions, the moral dilemmas involved in environmentalism, and the seeming inescapability of violence. As the novel alternates between its two time periods, it sets up increasingly tense storylines.
(Non-subscribers can read an excerpt of my full review at .)
One of my favorite novels of 2015. The depth of its literary reference and psychological insight is truly impressive, and reading this One of my favorite novels of 2015. The depth of its literary reference and psychological insight is truly impressive, and reading this from the author only intrigued me further. This is closely based on Hermione Lee’s biography of Virginia Woolf and would be a good companion read to that and to the later novels. Set in 1925�1941, it focuses on Woolf’s marriage and later career. Here “Adeline,� Woolf’s actual first name (abandoned for her middle name), represents Woolf’s stunted, adolescent self � “The seed of me that was then, and grew no further.�
Structured like a five-act play, the novel revolves around Virginia’s philosophical conversations with Leonard Woolf, Lytton Strachey and his lover Carrington, T.S. and Valerie Eliot, W.B. Yeats, and Woolf’s doctor, Octavia Wilberforce. Vincent has produced a remarkable picture of mental illness from the inside: “slowly comes the blackness with its burning edge-glow eating inward to the center until all the parchment of her right mind is consumed and there is nothing but ash.�
See my full review at . (Also included in my on recent novels about Virginia Woolf.)...more
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