Annie is heavily pregnant (37 weeks) and shopping one morning for a crib at Ikea in Portland, Oregon, when the long-predicted Big One strike3.75 stars
Annie is heavily pregnant (37 weeks) and shopping one morning for a crib at Ikea in Portland, Oregon, when the long-predicted Big One strikes the west coast. The massive earthquake leaves her buried under shelving units but she’s pulled out by the extremely snotty sales clerk who, just moments before, had completely dissed Annie and driven her to rage but who now becomes her partner on the long trek on foot to find their loved ones. And thus begins a very long and dangerous day through a wrecked city, full of many perils, human and otherwise. It has its moments of suspense, for sure, but the book is really more of a long rumination by Annie (the story is told in the first person) about her life: the lacklustre job that leaves her frustrated and joyless, her growing irritation with her husband, an aspiring actor who’s been at it for years and getting nowhere fast and who contributes little to the family purse, and her growing resentment about that and their mounting squabbles. As she struggles on, trying to reach her husband and fearful of his fate, she feels a great shift into a new perspective on her life that the earth’s tilt has caused. ...more
A deeply affecting memoir of the death of the author’s husband and her lasting grief. The format is especially memorable. She starts by recounting theA deeply affecting memoir of the death of the author’s husband and her lasting grief. The format is especially memorable. She starts by recounting the many small decisions and actions that piled one on the other to lead to her husband being in a specific place at a specific time, on a ferociously powerful motorcycle not his own, that led to his death in a traffic accident at a busy intersection in the heart of Lyon. It sounds a dirge: If only he had� If only he hadn’t� If only she had� etc. Such small things, individually. Then she tells the story of their last few days, creating a taut countdown-like effect. I believe I’ll be thinking about this one for a while. There’s nothing more forlorn than the useless wail of “if only.�
I will also mention that the book won France’s Prix Goncourt and this is the author’s first translated into English (she’s written several). It’s also called a novel, though it describes in detail the events leading up to the death, the research she did into many aspects involved, including having spoken (in some cases, at years� remove) to some of the people involved. So, a novel? Certainly a deeply autobiographical one....more
Eli Cranor specializes in writing novels about the working class, so we’re back in familiar territory here. We’re in a small town in Arkansa3.75 stars
Eli Cranor specializes in writing novels about the working class, so we’re back in familiar territory here. We’re in a small town in Arkansas where the principal industry is the raising and processing (slaughter) of chickens. The plant manager is ruthlessly ambitious, driving his employees to process ever larger numbers of birds in service of his intention to be promoted up the ladder. And the plant is an absolute hellscape that drives the workers to their physical breaking point: 10 hours on their feet, endlessly repeating the same motion, no bathroom breaks allowed, so they work in diapers or piss in their clothes where they stand and continue working. The focus is on two couples: a young Mexican man and woman, undocumented even though they’ve been in the States since they were infants, working at the plant for subsistence wages for nine years now, living in a trailer park, trying to save and get ahead, but with no real hope of making it; and the plant manager and his wife, parents of a six-month-old boy, living in a large, well-appointed house, with fancy vehicles, etc., etc., with a large debt burden, of course. These two very different worlds clash after a triggering event at the plant, and the tension builds until everything erupts into shocking violence....more
A warm and charming family-oriented drama about the getting of wisdom and finding out what really matters in life. A young Korean-American ma3.5 stars
A warm and charming family-oriented drama about the getting of wisdom and finding out what really matters in life. A young Korean-American man awakens in hospital from a two-year coma and discovers that his old life is *poof* gone with the wind. He turned 30 while he was in the coma, so there’s that, and he’s hospitalized in New Jersey, not Manhattan, where he’d been living for 10 years and engaged to a man he was very happy with—come to think of it, why is his fiance ghosting him?—and his job in a Manhattan advertising agency is gone, so it looks as if his only choice of having a place to live and recover is back with his kind of screwed-up family, none of whom he’d even spoken to for many years, in Fort Lee, NJ, very much a Korean enclave. And once he’s back on his feet, he returns to helping out at his family’s small restaurant, where his father is an accomplished sushi chef and under whom he’d been apprenticing before ditching it all and running for the Big Apple at 18. I was listening along and wondering why the title until I looked up one of the Japanese terms (yes, they’re a Korean family and they run a sushi restaurant, and that’s a whole thing in the novel.) You know how in a good sushi restaurant you can choose to sit at the counter and just put yourself in the chef’s hands, not ordering anything specific but leaving it up to him? It’s called “omakase,� which loosely translates as “I leave it up to you,� which is a also a tidy metaphor for what’s going on in the novel....more
I’m not going to rate this one because I can’t figure out whether there’s a right way to assign stars to a memoir that recounts a troubling personal sI’m not going to rate this one because I can’t figure out whether there’s a right way to assign stars to a memoir that recounts a troubling personal story, something terrible that happened to the author as a child 30 years earlier, by a person I don’t much care for as an adult. In her early 40s, Amy Griffin, highly successful in seemingly all aspects of her life, tries a new form of therapy and uncovers deeply hidden memories of her abuse by a trusted teacher in middle school. I feel for the suffering 12-year-old girl she was. But her account of the two years after her memories resurfaced spent trying to come to terms with this new knowledge and the light it shed on her driven perfectionism in the decades since left me feeling a little—what?—creeped-out by her profound narcissism, of which she seems entirely unaware. And did I mention shallow? And the book was so repetitive. It felt like there was a lot of padding to turn this into something book-length. Hmmmm� I’m being very uncharitable about this account of someone’s trauma, aren’t I? And yet I am aware of my shortcomings, I think. Ms. Griffin could use a smidge of that. Just sayin�....more
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