lit loquacity

3.5 stars (Come on goodreads with the half stars!) Crossposted here.I was initially intrigued by the subject matter of A Lady Cyclist's Guide to Kashgar, a lovely debut novel written by Suzanne Joinson.* The story alternates between two times and places - 1923 Kashgar and present day London - and follows two young women whose lives are vaguely connected, though you don't find out how until maybe a quarter of the way through the novel. Eva, from whose perspective the 1923 portion of the story is told, is a young woman posing as a missionary both to accompany her sister on an expedition to Asia and to gather material for a travel guide she hopes to write. Her sister Lizzie has become taken with Millicent, the elder, leader missionary, whose methods of conversion involve latching on to a woman's secret unhappiness in order to manipulate them into separating from their current way of life and joining the evangelical mission. On their journey, the stumble upon a young girl about to give birth. Though they try deliver the baby safely, the too-young mother dies, and the local people accuse Millicent of murder. They are taken to Kashgar and put on a sort of indefinite, somewhat loose house arrest. In present day London, Frieda, an academic scholar whose work involves much travel to Muslim areas to work on her research, has returned from her latest expedition to realize she's completely dissatisfied with her life, both her career and her relationship with a drunkard married man who appears to have no redeeming qualities (making one question why on earth she ever bothered with him to begin with - purely for the physical relationship seems to be the answer). Tayeb, a Yemeni in London illegally after his travel visa ended years ago, has been found out by the authorities and is trying to avoid deportation back to Yemen where he would most likely be jailed or killed. Frieda receives a strange death notice in the mail, and the story takes off from there. To be fair, it took quite a while for this book to pick up for me - possibly until a quarter or a third of the way through. The 1923 thread was fairly intriguing right away, but the journal-style read a little awkwardly for a while. The present day bit, following Frieda and Tayeb who form an unlikely bond in an almost too unlikely way, took a little too long to explain what was going on and why we should be interested. But right about the time the connection between the two stories becomes clear, the stories both really seem to hit their stride. Through Eva, we learn a little about Kashgar, a formerly Buddhist town in western China that had become mostly Muslim. It is one of the towns on the Silk Road, and during this time period attacks are beginning in the region. She's brought her bicycle along and occasionally manages to ride around town, and it later becomes crucial to her survival. Frieda discovers more about her past than she ever thought to ask. Both women in the process come into their own and realize important qualities about their characters.The bicycle remains in the background of much of the story, symbolizing both responsibility and freedom. The book is interspersed with bicycle guidance, a touchpoint of recurring themes: What the Bicycle Does: Mounted on a wheel, you feel at one the keenest sense of responsibility. You are there to do as you will within reasonable limits; you are continually called upon to judge and to determine points that before have not needed your consideration, and consequently you become alert, active, quick-sighted and keenly alive, as well to the rights of others as to what is due yourself. Though the novel did start off slowly for me, and had a few elements of unbelievability, it turned out to be a thoroughly enjoyable read. I generally enjoy novels that give a glimpse of other cultures, and this one lives up to that. It is also a refreshing story about women in that it does not revolve around men or their relationship to men, but rather their relationship with each other, with their families, and with themselves. *I received this book for early review courtesy of Bloomsbury via NetGalley.

Although I enjoyed The Marriage Plot overall, ultimately it fell short of realizing its potential. Eugenides is no doubt a talented author, and clearly does not rush anything to publication, having only published 3 novels in almost 20 years, but this could possibly have done with a little extra tweaking. This book has been out for a few months, so I'll try to keep the synopsis short. The love triangle plot revolves around three Brown graduates, focusing on the year or so following their graduation in June, 1982. Mitchell, the author in thinly veiled fictional form, is an awkward Greek boy from Detroit, obsessed with religion and with a girl named Madeleine. Madeleine is a bibliophilist English major, struggling with the semiotic interpretation of literature, particularly with the plot type centering on the marriage of its main characters, most popular in 18th & early 19th century lit. She's of Greek heritage and a privileged background, and is obsessed with Leonard. Leonard is supposed to be of more modest roots, from Portland, OR, and is wicked smart and bi-polar. Leonard is not obsessed with Mitchell and kind of likes Madeleine. I'll start with the virtues. Eugenides deftly captures all the emotional turmoil of transitioning from teenager child to young adult sent out into the "real" world. Everyone feels everything with vivid acuteness. Break-ups are earth-shattering, even if the relationship was a mere three months long. Everyone is afraid of rejection, though they all face a fair amount of it. The reader keenly feels every self-conscious apprehension. At one point, Madeleine becomes suddenly self-conscious when having a conversation with Leonard that isn't going so well: The conversation lapsed. And suddenly, to her surprise, Madeleine was flooded with panic. She felt the silence like a judgment against her. At the same time, her anxiety about the silence made it harder to speak. (This is a scenario to which I can definitely relate - my now spouse can attest to that.) Their joys are also intensely felt, and I enjoyed the poser-ish ways of college students brought to light, the unfounded self-assuredness flaunted to mask secret insecurities, the bookshelves lined with appropriately intellectual books, the patronizing combativeness that passes as flirting, etc. And the state of things at the end of the book was ultimately satisfying. Now, the vices. Madeleine is supposed to be a liberal, feminist character, but she spends most of the novel in reactive instead of active mode (even in the end, which took away from the otherwise satisfying ending). Her thesis is in part titled Some Thoughts on the Marriage Plot, but we never find out what those thoughts actually are. She is a grown woman who calls her father "Daddy." Is it just me that finds that weird and creepy? Mitchell, for most of the novel, is suffering his unrequited love for Madeleine, and is on a spiritual journey or mission of sorts. But his journey seems to be dismissed in the end. Leonard is mostly trying to deal with his bi-polar-ness, and we only get a glimpse into his story for one section, past the middle of the novel. The story is ultimately about finding oneself, or coming to some hard-earned conclusions about one's place in the world, and in that it succeeds, at least in part. The characters were interesting and relatable, and mostly likeable. It was a worthwhile read overall, as long as you can accept some of the elements that don't quite work.

this is one of my all-time favorite books, not so much for the story but for the non-linear story telling and the liquidity of the language.

If you prefer character-based novels, be forewarned: The Night Circus is almost entirely plot and setting driven, the characters merely outlines of chess pieces (I steal that comparison directly from the book), fleshed out only so much as necessary to move the story forward. Think Agatha Christie, with magic but no murder to solve - each character with an identifying characteristic to keep them straight (the tattooed contortionist, the farmer's son, the fortune-teller, the stylish former ballerina, the clockmaker, etc.). The character's special abilities are much more central to the tale than their personalities, which, as has been mentioned, were somewhat flat. All were defined by their skills and principles. I didn't actually mind this at all while reading - I was entirely riveted by the atmosphere Morgenstern deftly created. Her descriptions of this enchanting world brought the circus to life as if a Tim Burton film was playing in my head. The love story aspect more difficult to accept unless thought of in fairy tale terms - fairy tale romances are rarely based on much of substance, but mostly on whimsical fancy, and this is no exception, which was not an issue for me since the story was not first or foremost a romance, but more of a fable about what is under one's control and what is not, and the blurred lines between dreamlike illusions and reality - what is reality, after all, but what we choose to believe it to be.Full review can be found here.

Originally posted here.A friend of mine leant me By Nightfall by Michael Cunningham a couple months ago, saying I should read it if I liked The Hours. While I didn't enjoy it as much as his most well-known novel, it was still an engaging, fast read with the occasional delightful little insight.By Nightfall is told in the third person, but solely from the perspective of Peter Harris, an early 40-something, mildly successful art dealer that lives in Soho. As a reader, you spend a lot of time (too much, really) inside Peter's head, subject to all his self-musings, self-consciousness, self-criticism & self-admonishings (noticing a pattern?) over worrying about his own problems when there are people far worse off than he. (Those come across as a little disingenuous, more of, I think I'm supposed to be worried about other people but I'm really just not and I feel bad about it - does that make me a bad person? I don't want to be a bad person and I don't like feeling bad about others' downtroddenness so I wish their lives could at least appear to be comfortable enough so that I didn't feel I should feel bad about being much better off than them and still having Problems of my own, which are bothering me. Oh, woe is me.)It takes place in the very recent past, after the market crash of 2008 and the economic downturn, a time when rich people didn't want to appear too flamboyant about their richness because it would seem, well, tacky. And rich people are all about appearances, the poor souls. The novel is set over the course of a week of Peter's life, during which time his wife Rebecca's wanderlust and, well, lost, much-younger-brother (Mizzy) comes to town, for whom Peter finds he has ambiguous feelings, which causes a mid-life crisis of sorts. It seems Mizzy is rendered an aimless, beautiful drug-addict because he must live in the shadow of his older sisters' various successes, poor lad. He had to go hang out in Japan for a while, at some monasteries, but that doesn't give him a sense of purpose, either, and now he's globe-trotting again. I know, it's all very tragic. So now he's setting up temporary camp in his older sister's swank loft apartment in Soho. Oh, the tragedy. Am I being too harsh? Perhaps. Very wealthy, privileged people are people too, after all, and still can experience tragedy, although, I don't find purposelessness tragic, merely self-indulgent, at least, in this case, despite the fact that he's young. Although, I suppose, when your nickname, Mizzy, is short for The Mistake... what can you expect?One of the most unbelievable accounts in the novel happens when Peter mistakes Mizzy for his wife... while he's in the shower. Really? Come on. With clothes involved, it could be remotely believable, but not without. Rebecca, Peter's wife, is painted as an icy stranger, a mother-hen overly concerned about Mizzy's well-being. Peter describes Rebecca as thus, as they lie in bed together on a Sunday morning with the New York Times:They do not lie close to each other. Rebecca is absorbed in the book review. Here she is, grown from a tough, wise girl to a savvy and rather cool-hearted woman, weary of reassuring Peter about, well, almost everything: grown to be a severe if affectionate critic. Here is her no-nonsense girlhood transmogrified into a womanly capacity for icy, calmly delivered judgments. "Womanly capacity"? Obviously, I'm going to take issue with that. Men have the same capacity for piercing the heart with statements calculated to do just that. And this is how he views his wife? Judgmental because she's tired of reassuring him? How low is this man's self-esteem that his wife's to blame for not boosting him up enough?It appears I didn't enjoy this book at all, and though it's true I read many passages with eyes rolling, that's not the whole story. Cunningham has a knack for capturing - with uncomfortable accuracy - those intimate interactions we have with people whom we've known for years, with whom we've established a comfortable rapport that can turn into assumptions about another that then turns us into strangers interacting with our own out-dated projections of the other person instead of continuing to work (it can be work) to stay in tune with each others' ever-changing subtle natures. These two are clearly out of sync with each other, and a strong, judgmental resentment has been built around their own misconceptions of whom their spouse is which doesn't at all match with whom they want their spouse to be. That is the danger we face in long-term intimate partnerships, such as marriage, and it is what we have to work to avoid to make such relationships survive. The dialogue is normally wry and witty banter, usually enjoyable to read, and though Peter's self-conscious pretensions are trying, the novel does capture, with some accuracy, the weird self-critical back-and-forth that can go on in one's head in times of life-crises, the ones that occasionally lead to a little self-insight:Beauty--the beauty Peter craves--is this, then: a human bundle of accidental grace and doom and hope. Mizzy must have hope, he must, he wouldn't shine like this if he were in true despair, and of course he's young, who in this world despairs more exquisitely than the young, that's something the old tend to forget.I'd say you should read this if you're curious, but be ready to take the self-delusional pretensions with a grain of salt. It was unique in its ever-second-guessing-of-oneself nature, told in the third person, and I'm guessing most of us would be lying if we said we've never gone through such times, even if we haven't reached mid-life crises yet. Greg over at New Dork Review of Books warned me about its pretentiousness when I started reading, and I wonder if that colored my experience. Hard to say. Despite my criticism, I think I enjoyed it a wee bit more than he did.

Mitchell manages to connect the past, present, and two levels of dystopian futures in an engaging and insightful novel consisting of loosely interlocking narratives told in drastically different styles. The structure is very different from anything I've read before - it is somewhat modeled after Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night, A Traveler, a collection of stories that seem to stop in the middle or just before the climax. Cloud Atlas, however, picks up those threads later in the novel and finishes each story.The characters range from a gullible young lawyer to a scheming and talented obscure composer to an "awakened fabricant" (think Blade Runner) in the future. An aging publisher, who manages to get himself trapped in a retirement home, laments upon his life's chosen profession:Why have you given your life to books, TC? Dull, dull, dull! The memoirs are bad enough, but all that ruddy fiction! Hero goes on journey, stranger comes to town, somebody wants something, they get it or they don't, will is pitted against will. 'Admire me, for I am a metaphor.'The most difficult section for me to read was "Sloosha's Crossing," which is written in a sort of future ruralspeak dialect, but it was also such a riveting section that I couldn't help but read it quickly. The narrative's main climax occurs here, basically, in the middle of the novel, and yet you still want to pick up the threads of each of the other stories.The overarching themes in the background occasionally seem heavy-handed, but never in an offensive way. In one aside, a tertiary character offers this explanation of how humanity has arranged itself:'Another war is always coming, Robert. They are never properly extinguished. What sparks wars? The will to power, the backbone of human nature. The threat of violence, the fear of violence, or actual violence, is the instrument of this dreadful will... The nation state is merely human nature inflated to monstrous proportions. QED, nations are entities whose laws are written by violence.'Quite a bleak outlook on the state of things, and one that currently can't help but ring mostly true. But out of this hopelessness, one finds optimism at the conclusion of the novel, one of my favorite reads this year, and one I'd recommend to anyone looking for something different and does not mind elements of dystopian futures.

I finally got around to reading Mystic River about a month ago at the recommendation of a few Lehane fans, both diehard and casual, and it did not let me down. Even though I saw the movie years ago when it came out, the novel was still surprising (and better than the movie for offering much more nuance and inner psychological turmoil). (One problem with seeing a movie before reading the book is the inability to picture the characters as anything but as the actors that portrayed them. For example, I could not for the life of me picture Jimmy as light-haired or blond.)The basic plot revolves around three men who knew each other when they were children and drifted apart after a pinnacle incident changed their lives, one life in particular, terribly. 25 years later, yet another horrific event brings them all back together, with devastating consequences. The well-rounded characters are painted with depth and precision - well, as much precision as one can get when rendering psychological portraits. Sometimes Celeste found herself consciously trying to ignore a notion that it wasn't only the things in her life but her life, itself, that was not meant to have any weight or lasting impact, but was, in fact, programmed to break down at the first available opportunity so that its few usable parts could be recycled for someone else while the rest of her vanished. (123)The novel progresses with a sort of compassionate suspense, leading the reader to the inevitable outcome he or she knows is coming while still hoping otherwise. The entire story is steeped in foreboding....Jimmy felt that mean certainty again.You felt it in your soul, no place else. You felt the truth there sometimes--beyond logic--and you were usually right if it was the type of truth that was the exact kind you didn't want to face, weren't sure you could. That's what you tried to ignore, why you went to psychiatrists and spent too long in bars and numbed your brain in front of TV tubes00to hide from hard, ugly truths your soul recognized long before your mind caught up. (115)Lehane manages to capture what just about anyone might be capable of, given the right experiential contexts and scenarios. It reveals the depths of humanity's compassion/love and its horrific evil, and it explores the tenuous morality and honor most of us strive for in our own way. All in all, it was a fantastic read, and I look forward to reading more of Lehane's work.

Background/sysnopsis: Joan is 64, married to literary sensation Joe Castlemen for over 40 years, and he's about to receive a prestigious literary award to mark his accomplishments over the years. The story wanders between past and present, from when they met back in the mid 1950s when she was a student in his writing class at Smith College. (He was only 5-7 years older, so it's not an entirely creepy student/professor affair.) This was, of course, before the 2nd wave of feminism swept the country, when (middle-upper class, white) women went to college and worked as assistants or secretaries to kill time until they managed to marry, and could then fulfill their purpose in life by gracefully, meekly, invisibly supporting and accenting the important lives of their husbands (and children).Joe once told me he felt a little sorry for women, who only got husbands. Husbands tried to help by giving answers, being logical, stubbornly applying force as though it were a glue gun. Or else they didn't try to help at all, for they were somewhere else entirely, out walking in the world by themselves. But wives, oh wives, when they weren't being bitter or melancholy or counting the beads on the abacus of disappointment, they could take care of you with delicate and effortless ease.Impressions: Wolitzer is exactly the kind of witty satirical writer I love. Joan tells her story with a wry world-weariness, highlighting her competing desires, desires she didn't realize had any right to compete at all, for women. She is told, early on, that she is a talented writer, but then, a woman author who writes boldly and 'masculinely' warns her: "Don't think you can get their attention," she said."Whose?"She looked at me sadly, impatiently, as if I were an idiot... "The men," she said. "The men who write the reviews, who run the publishing houses, who edit the papers, the magazines, who decide who gets to be taken seriously, who gets put up on a pedestal for the rest of their lives. Who gets to be King Shit.""So you're saying it's a conspiracy?" I asked gently."If you use that word it makes me appear envious and insane," Elaine Mozell went on. "Which I'm not. Yet. But yes, I guess you could call it a conspiracy to keep women's voices hushed and tiny and the men's voices loud."Joan seems to take this advice to heart, and doesn't allow herself to want things beyond what the world tells her she should want. She loves her children, and her husband, although she allows him more unattended faults and betrayals than I could ever abide in anyone. (I say that, but I live now, not then.) The gender politics of both marriage and the literary world are the main themes of the novel, in the form of the negotiation that women had to make just to get through their lives. It sounds like it could be a bitter tale, but it's not, not really. It's tender, insightful, wry; Joan is resigned to her fate with a touch of bitterness and regret occasionally drifting to the surface, but she seems to know it useless to dwell on past mistakes and shortcomings. She's a woman who's sacrificed more of herself than an individual should ever have to give up for the happiness of another, and yet she is strong in the quiet, non-boastful way women were allowed to show their strength.I will say the 'shocking' ending the book cover boasts was not shocking to me at all. I thought it was supposed to be subtly obvious, but since apparently it's not supposed to be obvious, I can't discuss it (though I'm dying to). This novel would make an excellent choice for book clubs, especially any with desire to explore gender stereotypes and inequality, as well as the inevitable inequities that develop in a marriage (because no matter how hard you try, it is impossible to make any partnership exactly equal at all times). I would rate it just shy of 5/5, only because at times the gender inequalities seemed slightly too over the top, but then again, I live now, not then. Overall I loved this book. It was a reading flavor explosion, and one for savoring.

Leave it to Orwell to suck the hope outta you.

While the writing style is often awkward and the text isn't as organized as I'd like, the information is fascinating. I found the sections discussing Greece, Rome, and western religion the most intriguing, possibly because I already had a good foundation in these histories and cultures to form a baseline for putting her writing into context.

Well, that book certainly flew by much more quickly than expected.

Oddly, this series ended exactly how I thought it would, and the only realistically acceptable way it could, in a way.

I had something of a love/hate relationship with this novel, but the writing, the language, is superb. Lyrical. It captures much of the discontent and discomfort of that time, as well as the strange realization, as youth merges with adulthood, that life will never, ever be quite what we'd expected. The quote seems to be the main theme around which the book revolves:Quote: "How sad, he thought, that desire found new objects but did not abate, that when it came to longing there was no end."

Brown exquisitely captured the easy fall-back into old family dynamics upon returning home as an adult, as well as the floundering sense of failure we can feel in our late twenties/early thirties when we realize life has not turned out how we'd pictured it would be. Optimistically, in changing our perspectives, we can somewhat free ourselves from - or at least learn from and stop berating ourselves about - our baggage-ridden, broken pasts.Quote: "There are times in our lives when we have to realize our past is precisely what it is, and we cannot change it. But we can change the story we tell ourselves about it, and by doing that, we can change the future."

Christopher Boone, a 15-year-old "mathematician with some behavioural difficulties," tells his story in straight-forward, matter-of-fact, unembellished terms. He appears to be autistic, but on a can-function-in-society (mostly) level, with substantial.. mind-quirks. He's incredibly intelligent, especially when it comes to math. The maths and other digressions added to the novel, I felt, and were interesting in and of themselves. (Is it wrong that one of today's goals is to have fun with quadratic equations, just for kicks? I miss math.) Christopher is actually an easy character to relate to. I could relate to the need for timetables, and definite solutions.His parents, of course, have trouble relating to their son. The stress of trying to raise someone who thinks so very differently from them takes its toll, and manifests in outrageous, and yet realistic, ways. Although the entire story is told from Christopher's point of view, the emotion and intentions of the other characters come through to the reader, despite that Christopher himself cannot interpret this data in any meaningful way beyond the fact of what is said and what is happening.It is interesting that Haddon himself has little to no experience with autism, or autistic children. In fact, he did very little research on the subject in writing the book. Those who live with or know autistic people may be a better judge, but I felt the book was true to what I understand of the of that particular mental-mode. Autism fascinates me, but I also agree with what Haddon wrote about the subject: "Labels say nothing about a person. They say only how the rest of us categorise that person. Good literature is always about peeling labels off. And treating real people with dignity is always about peeling the labels off. A diagnosis may lead to practical help. But genuinely understanding another human being involves talking and listening to them and finding out what makes them an individual, not what makes them part of a group."And that is the take-away from the novel as well.

Always clever, Christie threw me off the right trail again. I should have stuck with my gut.