"At the Water's Edge": Literal and Figurative Monsters

I loved Sara Gruen's book "Water for Elephants." In that book she transported me to the inner world of a traveling circus at the advent of The Great Depression when everyone who worked there was lucky to have a job.  Told through the recollections of the 90 year old Jacob, the reader longs for Marlena and Jacob's relationship to grow and cheers for Rosie the elephant.  It was a book I couldn't put down and I was completely pulled into the story.

Sara Gruen's latest novel "At the Water's Edge" possesses an intriguing storyline just like "Water for Elephants." The story revolves around Maddie and,Ellis (who are married) and Hank (their best friend), three socialite partiers who are spared the horrors of WWII in their elitist New York City existence.  Rather than facing the sacrifices that so many need to make, they live a life of excess and fun until Ellis and Maddie disgrace Ellis's rich family one too many times.  Ellis contrives a ridiculous plan to restore his good faith in the family by clearing his father's reputation as a con-artist who set up a Loch Ness monster hoax.  Even though it's wartime, Ellis convinces Maddie and Hank to journey from New York City to Scotland's highlands in search of the Loch Ness monster.

The journey is perilous through stormy, war torn seas, and when they arrive at their destination in Scotland, their reception is chilly at best.  Ellis and Hank reveal themselves as spoiled, rich, ruthless party boys who have no concern for others, and Maddie begins to see the truth of her marriage as well as her own part in a life she hasn't really been living but deadening with anxiety pills.  While Ellis and Hank abandon her to spend time together carousing and fruitlessly searching for a monster that may or may not exist, Maddie realizes the true monster is not necessarily the legendary one in the Loch, but the one she calls her husband.

The best moments of this book come from the genuine friendships that Maddie forms with "the help" at the inn.  Even more than that, the best character in the book is Angus, the mysterious inn keeper who disappears every day, but protects his staff and his community tirelessly from the threat of enemies both from the war and the patrons who frequent the inn.  The relationship between Maddie and Angus builds throughout the novel's second half and culminates in truly touching fashion.

Rife with legends, superstitions, dark and mysterious beauty, the setting of Scotland's Highlands offers much in the way of cold and lonely landscapes, but Gruen doesn't seem able to actualize all the elements that she orchestrates in the novel.  Ellis is a heavy handed bully, and so unlikable that he seems like more of a caricature than an actual person. Although Hank shows some signs of redeeming traits, he ultimately remains a flat character with little to offer in the way of the storyline.  The whole motif of monsters among us set against the backdrop of WWII and the Loch Ness monster are just as heavy handed as Ellis's drunken and drugged abuse.  The theme is fitting and the different components are there for an amazing story to unfold, but instead the narration and the flow of the plot feel clunky and wooden.

The book itself is highly readable.  I was able to finish it in just a day and a half, but the satisfying feeling I get at the end of a great book just didn't materialize at the end of this one.  It's good, but not great. Interesting, but not mind blowing.  With the rain soaked setting, I felt cold reading it and am ready to warm up with a hot summer book.

"Hausfrau": A Murky Look Into the Life of a Lonely, Sad Woman

I don't know where I read that "Hausfrau" by Jill Alexander Essbaum was a great book to read.  Even the book jacket says "Intimate, intense, and written with the precision of a Swiss Army knife." Hmm... not sure I'd agree with all that.  My biggest take away from "Hausfrau" is that life can be very sad and very lonely and very destructive for people who are bored  and totally disconnected with themselves.

I am embarrassed to admit that I have never read Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina" and maybe if I had I would understand the references to the Swiss trains always being on time unless someone jumped on the tracks.  Maybe I would have understood Anna Benz's sulky, childish behavior and the ease with which she made horrible choices.  When I started the book, I had a hard time following the jumpy narration that vacillates between Anna's Jungian psychotherapy sessions with Doctor Messerli to Anna's German classes during which she often analyzes how the language mirrors her life to Anna's adulterous exploits with a fellow German class student (Archie) and then flashbacks to another affair she had 2 years prior with a man named Stephen who Anna apparently believed she was in love with.  The reader also gets glimpses into Anna's "real life" with her hot headed, banker husband, Bruno whose mother Ursula watches Anna's three young children while she is in Zurich sleeping around, going to German class, and lying to her therapist.

Anna's life seems comfortable enough, but she's bored and disconnected, and rather than "filling the hole" with food (as she later ponders while eating icing from a cake at her daughter's 1st birthday party), she fills it with tawdry sexual affairs.  I'm not sure how I was supposed to feel during Anna and Archie's trysts which were written in graphic detail, or how I was supposed to feel about one of Bruno's friends hitting on and then hooking up with Anna, or about Anna's flashbacks to her affair with Stephen. Mostly I felt sad and disgusted.  I know people have affairs, but Anna's ability to feel nothing - no remorse, no guilt, no emotion was the saddest part of all.

The final third of the book was the most engaging part after Anna is thrown into an unthinkable tragedy which exposes her for the liar and cheater that she is.  It sheds light on what she did have that she took for granted and maybe what she should have left behind before it spiraled out of control.  There are parts that were uncomfortable for me to read, but while I slogged through much of the narration in the first part of the book, I was compelled to read quickly at the end.

There was much to like about this book.  There are many questions about love, marriage, infidelity, lies, truth that we don't want to face, and more about the properties of fire than I ever knew.  The first line of the book is "Anna was a good wife, mostly" but by the end, I wasn't convinced about that.  Nor was I ever convinced that Bruno was a good husband.  The most redeeming character in the whole book was chattering Mary, the Canadian woman who becomes Anna's close friend and caretaker when Anna's depression impedes her from taking care of herself or her children. The conversations with Doctor Messerli brought up good questions about destiny and fate, and I especially enjoyed Anna's conversation with the priest about predestination.  "It's God who doles out the dominoes.  It is we who set them in line and tip them over.  We have no control over the particular lot we're given.  but we can choose how we arrange what we have. And we can choose to start over, when everything's been knocked down and broken."

Anna's life domino arrangement choices weren't so good, and she didn't really know how to mend the broken pieces of her life.  She ended just as sad and lonely and weepy as she began with little thought of who and what mattered in her world.

Maybe my biggest take away is to be emotionally connected to where I am and who I am. As Anna Benz's life proves, disconnecting emotionally or physically leads to more than one wrong turn.

"All the Light We Cannot See": Amazing. Simply Amazing.

"Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever." 

In the past year, I've read about 100 books.  I could argue, that Anthony Doerr's "All the Light We Cannot See" is the best one that I've read, and even more than that, maybe one of the best books I have ever read.  There's so much to love about this book - the short intriguing chapters (many are only a page and a half long), the poetic writing style that is both engaging and challenging, the characters who are now lodged in my brain forever, the perspective of WWII that Doerr presents with the two separate story lines which are not typical, but show another side of the war that I never contemplated - the side of choices that people had to make in wartime, or maybe it's Doerr's superb storytelling ability. Even when he switches back and forth in time sequence, and storyline from chapter to chapter, he keeps his reader with him.  When I fall into a book that I don't want to finish because I don't want to lose the characters, when I am both horrified and mesmerized by what I read on every page, when my heart races as the characters endure hardships and terrifying situations, and when I am somehow transported to another time and place - I know I am reading masterpiece.

After I finished the last page of "All the Light We Cannot See" I said, "Wow."  I was home alone and although I had about 1,000,000 other things to do, I needed to keep reading the last 100 pages of the book to find out what happened to Werner Phennig and Marie-Laure LeBlanc. The story opens in Saint-Malo, a small (and dramatic) walled city in Brittany that has been occupied by German soldiers and as we find out in the subscript at the beginning of the novel, Saint-Malo "was almost totally destroyed by fire . . . Of the 865 buildings within the walls, only 182 remained standing and all were damaged to some degree." Marie-Laure, who is in her attic, hears something dropping from planes and with her acute senses due to her blindness, discerns that these are leaflets because she can smell the fresh ink.  In the same town at the same time, Werner, a young German soldier who specializes in radios, is trapped in the basement rubble of a nearby hotel.  These two characters will intersect in magical ways throughout the novel.

Marie-Laure lives with her father who is the key keeper at a museum in Paris.  At age 6, Marie-Laure loses her eyesight and her father relentlessly helps her to cope with the adversities she faces as a young blind girl.  He constructs elaborate scale models of their neighborhood for her to study and encourages her to find her way and lead their walks, so she can learn independence.  He also constructs intricate puzzle boxes for her to solve.  When the war begins, their world,  like the worlds of so many others, changes drastically.  The museum owner entrusts one of the most sought after stones in the world, The Sea of Flames, with trusted employees from the museum; three fakes are distributed and one real stone.  None of the employees know which they are carrying, and Marie-Laure's father has one in his possession.  They flee Paris and end up with Etienne, Marie-Laure's reclusive great uncle in Saint Malo.

The parallel storyline belongs to Werner Phennig, a snow haired orphan who has an uncanny knack for constructing and repairing radios.  Word of his amazing skills reaches a german officer who is in need of a repairman for his expensive radio.  When Werner fixes what no other person was able to fix, the german officer recommends that Werner should apply to a Nazi training school for young boys.  Werner, who fears succumbing to the fate that his dad suffered - being crushed while mining, accepts the offer and is transported into a "kill or be killed" world where logic disappears, friendships are trumped by violence, and being special or different are looked upon as weaknesses.  Dr. Hauptman who mentors Werner during his time at the school tells the students, "Life if chaos, gentlemen. And what we represent is an ordering to that chaos. Even down to the genes. We are ordering the evolution of a species.  Winnowing out the inferior, the unruly, the chaff."  The whiter the hair, the bluer the eyes, the faster you can run, the crueler you can be earn higher marks than compassion and artistry.  Werner soon learns that hardening his heart is his best defense.

As the book progresses and the war intensifies the lives of these two characters criss cross and meld together the past innocence of Werner's youth when he and his sister Jutta would listen to the radio and hear a professor's voice who talked about light, "The brain is locked in total darkness . . . And yet the world it constructs in the mind is full of light. It brims with color and movement.  So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?" and the evils that overshadow wartime for both soldiers and civilians.  Connected by radios and terror, violence and survival, Werner and Marie-Laure meet and in a way save each other.

The title, "All The Light We Cannot See" takes on so many meanings throughout this book - from the radio broadcasts, to Marie-Laure's blindness, to being trapped in an attic or in a basement buried in the rubble from the collapsed Hotel of Bees, but the real lightness in this book was the airy way in which Doerr led the reader through his intensely lyrical style.  Each short chapter reads like it's own vignette, but never feels choppy in the scope of the sweeping novel.  Doerr proves that he is a master of storytelling, and a craftsman of words.  I literally at times got a bit teary eyed with how beautiful the writing was in this book.

If it's been awhile since you've lost yourself in a fiction masterpiece, it's time to pick up "All The Light We Cannot See."

"The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry": The Journey to Find Meaning in a Life of Drudgery

"You'd think walking should be the simplest thing . . . Just a question of putting one foot in front of the other.  But it never ceases to amaze me how difficult the things are that are supposed to be instinctive really are." 

I once hiked for 6 hours on the Appalachian Trail.  When I returned to my car, I felt relaxed, hungry and mildly exhausted.  During my hiking days, I would run into "through hikers" who intended to hike the 2,200 mile journey that stretches from Georgia to Maine.  They looked feral, and thin but intently focused on their ending point, and that's how Harold Fry, the unlikely hero in Rachel Joyce's book, "The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry" looks in the middle of his journey when he decides to let go of all material things - even money and tough out his journey by trusting in the universe to provide what he needs. 

Harold Fry, a recently retired man who lives in a small English village with his overly critical and hardened wife, Maureen receives a letter from Queenie Hennessy written in shaky handwriting that says she is in hospice care and wanted to say goodbye.  Harold, unsure of how to respond to his former work mate and friend, writes a quick reply letter.  As he goes to put his letter in the mail, he decides to keep walking.  He makes it to the post office, and decides to keep walking.  Without telling anyone (including his pinched wife, Maureen), he starts walking the over 600 mile journey to hand deliver the letter to Queenie himself.  He alerts the hospice directors that he is walking to say goodbye to Queenie and politely asks her to wait for his arrival.  

Thus begins Harold's journey of self discovery as he spans the English countryside encountering interesting characters who want to help him, talk to him and eventually follow his lead and journey with him. Harold faces numerous challenges on his walk to Queenie.  First, he contends with his health issues.  Walking so much at first causes bruises and aches and pains that Harold is unaccustomed to in his soft life of tea and sitting on a couch.  He struggles against the weather, his physical condition, and hunger, but mostly along his journey he struggles with self-doubt (Is he doing the right thing? Does it even matter? Why is he walking in the first place? Can he really walk over 600 miles?). Even more pervasive by the end of the novel,  Harold struggles with the demons of his past and the realizations about what his life has become.  

In many ways, we are all Harold Fry, struggling against ourselves in our journey through life.  Unlike Harold Fry, many people are too afraid to face our fears and travel through them to annihilate them and live more fully.  Most of us aren't drawn by our instincts or by the internal drive that tells us that we can accomplish whatever we want to accomplish regardless of the odds.  Most of us don't put our trust in the universe to provide us with what we need. 

I thought often of the Henry Ford quotation while reading this book, "Whether you think you can or think you can't - you're right." Jodie, from my book club, asked the question, "Could it even be possible for someone like Harold to take this journey?"  My immediate and heart felt response was, "Absolutely!" We can all accomplish so much more than we believe we can.  Just like Harold, it might not always be clear why we need to do the things that are the most unlikely, but if we believe we can, we might just meet with success and overcome whatever plagues us from our past or in our present lives.  

One of the nuns who works in Queenie's hospice center tells Harold that his journey to see Queenie and his respectful request for her to wait for him to arrive to say goodbye is "a rather unusual kind of healing." She goes on to say, " I don't know how you came up with it.  But maybe it's what the world needs.  A little less sense, and a little more faith." 

That sounds like good advice to me.  

If you are looking for an inspiring book about an unlikely hero overcoming impossible odds on a journey of healing and self discovery, Rachel Joyce might just be your new favorite author and "The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry" might become your new favorite book. 

"The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry: : A book for book people

I love books more than I should.  I love the way they smell. I love the way they feel.  I love when I get to a point in a book where I don't want to stop reading, and I don't even remember turning the pages until I am at the very last page.  I love when I meet characters who speak my world and my truth.  I love reading real stories of real people who have overcome incredible hurdles.  And, of course, I love bookstores.  I mourned the day that Borders closed in York, Pa, even though my favorite bookstores are the small ones run by independent store owners who just love books.  When e-readers became the rave, I held fast to my tangible books with pages and covers.  There is something about the weight of a real book in my hands - the weight of it, the protection of it, that makes me feel more alive. When I lived in London, I got into the habit of always having a book tucked under my arm no matter where I went, that way I would never feel alone.  Reading books helps me feel more connected - way more than Facebook, or any type of social media ever could.

I am not alone in my passion for books, and when I find a book that is really written for book people but in an unpretentious, unassuming way, I want to rave about it. I passed by "The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry" by Gabrielle Zevin in the Hot Picks section of the Crystal Lake library several times before picking it up and reading the book jacket which said, "an unforgettable tale of transformation and second chances, an irresistible affirmation of why we read, and why we love." Yes, please.  I want to read a book that has all of that wonderful-ness inside of it.

The story starts with A.J. Fikry, a contentious, recent, young widower who own Island Book Store on the tiny Massachusetts, Alice Island.  After his wife dies in a tragic car accident when she is two months pregnant, Fikry spirals into a depression, drinking himself into isolation and rage.  He pushes away his sister in law, Ismay, who wants to pick him up and set him straight, and the very friendly Chief Lambiase who seems genuinely concerned for Fikry's well-being.  He is rude to everyone including his customers, employees, and even the very hopeful and persistent Knightley Press sales rep, Amelia Loman.  Everything changes when shortly after losing his prized possession, Tamerlane (a rare and valuable collection of Edgar Allen Poe poems), he gets a special package delivered to his store and he decides to keep it (or should I say to keep her).  Fikry's icy exterior melts the day baby Maya comes into his world and he decides to raise her as his own and eventually adopt her.

The short novel weaves its magic through the power of book people coming together in a decade long span of love, loss and redemption, not to mention some powerful statements about the beauty of reading and the meaning of our lives. By the end of the novel these statements increase as Fikry tries to articulate what he is not able to for Maya.  He says, "We read to know we're not alone.  We read because we are alone. We read and we are not alone.  We are not alone."  Fikry finds love, but he finds more than that, he finds a family and a new revitalization of his book store.  He comes to the realization, "We aren't the things we collect, acquire, read.  We are, for as long as we are here, only love. The things we loved.  The people we loved.  And these, I think really do live on."

Zevin, a seasoned YA writer,  presents a few twists and turns in her first adult fiction book, but each rings with believability. She paces the book brilliantly and even though it spans a decade, it feels like life - it's over before you know it.  For the book people out there, who just like Lambiase discovers and Zevin believes (as she stated in an interview with NPR) - everyone is a book person, you just need to find the right book, who like paper and how books feel in their back pockets, too, this is a book for you.

"We Are Water": A rambling tale with too much tragedy

Darn you, Wally Lamb.

I'm just so disappointed that I didn't like this book that I actually feel angry with Wally Lamb.

I read "She's Come Undone" by Wally Lamb all the way back during my undergraduate classes at the University of Minnesota.  My then boyfriend, Eric, was just starting his first real job as an academic recruiter for the University.  We took a road trip to one of his recruiting conferences in the late summer, and while he was walking the floor touting how awesome the UofM was, I was captured by Wally Lamb's deft 1st persona narrative depiction of Dolores Price and her struggle with life as an overweight teen and woman.  I spent that weekend poolside reading at a fast pace, just wanting to keep going. Lamb's ability to capture the voice of a tragic and comical heroine, left me in awe of his writing talent.  His next effort, "I Know This Much Is True" didn't leave me as breathless, but I still enjoyed it.  It's been awhile since I've read Lamb, but when I saw this book int he library with it's beautiful title and haunting blue cover, I couldn't wait to sink in.

Even after the first chapter, I knew that "We Are Water" wasn't going to rock my world.  The novel centers on the lives of the Oh family, a tragically flawed and messed up bunch of people.  Annie Oh works as an artist selling her angry art installations to famous celebrities like Lady Gaga.  Annie recently ended her 27 year marriage to husband, Orion, to wed her rich, socialite art promoter, Vivica.  Orion suffers from this news and while reeling from the loss of his wife, he also loses his career as a college counselor amidst sexual harassment allegations.  Annie and Orion's three children also suffer from this news, but each deal with issues of their own including explosive anger, disillusionment, prostitution, and loneliness.

Throughout this stream of consciousness novel, the narrator changes with each chapter, but the rambling diatribe seems to be consistent among each of the characters.  They all divulge all of their secrets in waves and waves of confessionals.  From the tormented molester of Annie's youth, to the racist mom of Josephus Jone's "girlfriend," to the seemingly virtuous Ari, all the characters sound almost identical.

I found the endless tragedies in this book a bit much.  Did Orion really need to be wheel chair bound? Did Andrew need to be tormented indefinitely due to his mother's physical abuse? Too much is too much.  I thought that about the narration, too.  There was no subtlety in this book.  Every story line goes over the top with too much (in the case of Kent's storyline, way too much).  It wasn't until the very end of the book while Andrew and his dad have heart to heart talks about life as they walk along the beach, that I saw glimmers of the genius of Wally Lamb's life insights, but by that time it was too late to save the entire book of stream of consciousness ramblings (and what's with the ...... all over the place, Mr. Lamb?).

I loved the link to the title (which also comes close to the end) that “We are like water, aren’t we? We can be fluid, flexible when we have to be. But strong and destructive, too.” And something else, I think to myself. Like water, we mostly follow the path of least resistance.” 

I may have loved "She's Come Undone" but this book is one that I would recommend leaving on the shelf if you see it on the new fiction section of the library, especially if you are looking for a book to capture you poolside during the last remaining days of the summer season.