This short, fast-paced novel takes you into the world of "peculiar" children (a girl who can summon fire with her hands; another who floats like her blood courses with helium; a boy whose stomach is full of bees), lost to time and facing a group of "hollows" who want to upend their world. Ransom Riggs's book is inventive, and I particularly admire the way she's used found photographs (see below) to inspire the narrative. Charming, quirky---just a lovely little piece.
Vaclav and Lena, Haley Tanner
Vaclav and Lena is a lovely story of being and becoming -- a very New York tale (an immigrant tale), and a classic boy-meets-girl piece. Tanner masterfully blends naivete and narrative sophistication; I only wish I knew what was to come for VacLena post-high school
Wallflower at the Orgy, Nora Ephron
Ephron's collection of essays is a nice introduction to her writing; in the foreword, she explains the importance of critical distance:
[I]t took me a long time to become comfortable using the first-person singular pronoun in my work. In the articles in this book I used it gingerly ... The work I have done subsequently is considerably more personal and considerably more full of the first-person singular pronoun, but I still believe that the best approach to its use ought to be discomfort. Do you really need it? Does it add something special to the piece? Is what you think interesting enough to make the reader care? Are you saying something that no one has said? Above all, do you understand that you are not as important as what you're covering?
Mr. Peanut, Adam Ross
This psychological mystery is probably good for people aching to read something in a vein similar to Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl; it's nowhere near as neatly packaged and tightly woven as Flynn's book, but it does fuss around about the joys and discontents of marriage, with a murder (or a few) at the center of the story.
There are several overlapping narratives to Mr. Peanut, and to be truthful, I'm not exactly sure I grasped what the real story was, given a structure in which the narrator was writing a novel and that novel began to overlap with his life; sorting out the threads was difficult. That said, a bit of a mindbender is good every now and again, and the ideas in Ross's writing are intriguing.
One theme that I thought was explored rather well was restlessness, a certain yearning for something beyond the day-to-day: "People think of travel, of movement, as a kind of reprieve from life," a man is counseled. "But they're wrong. Movement isn't a reprieve. There is no reprieve. Movement is our permanent state." And yet where does all that movement lead? "I want to arrive," another character says. "I want to be finished. I want to be done with the person I was." Trying too hard to craft a coherent narrative arc is just as futile as imagining you can momentarily exempt yourself from the world; best to just live and let live?
Dora: A Headcase, Lidia Yuknavitch
Something in the vein of Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, which offered an alternate history for Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, Lidia Yuknavitch reenvisions a famous Freud case study. Violent, riveting, uncomfortable, but also sly and whip-smart, this is a great read for anyone who's been through those rocky teenage years. Like the short film the narrator makes, Yuknavitch's scope is broad:
It's ... about everything. This world we live in. The bodies we're stuck with. The lives we get whether we want them or not. How hard you have to work just to get through a fucking day without killing yourself. And how girls are virtually invisible.
May We Be Forgiven, A. M. Homes
I really didn't know what to expect when I started this book; I suppose I thought it would be a staid look at American life today, the problematics of families today. And I guess it is that, to an extent, but it's so much more. A man sleeps with his brother's wife, and everything spins out of control, yet somehow, somehow, the world holds together. We make mistakes and we atone for them, and even when that atonement isn't quite enough, the trying (the trying, trying, trying) makes for a new kind of redemption, a new kind of family. I read the entire 500 pages over the course of a day and a half; even though I consider myself an avid reader, this is perhaps the book I've devoured most rapturously within recent memory.
Vampires in the Lemon Grove, Karen Russell
Russell is at her best with more delightful weirdness in Vampires in the Lemon Grove: women transformed into silkworms, American presidents reincarnated as horses, tailgaters for a yearly battle between whale and krill (TEAM KRILL). Not every short story is a hit, but pieces like "Proving Up" (a tale of homesteading and the marshaling of a glass window from one unsteady outpost to another) showcase her truly outstanding talent.
School for Love, Olivia Manning
A WWII novel set in Jerusalem, Olivia Manning's School for Love is about trying to come together when the world seems to be pulling apart. What I'll remember most, though, is little Felix's love for his adopted cat, Faro; it's amazing, the bonds that can be forged with felines. NYT's Lens Blog recently featured an incredibly touching photo essay on the topic; Hiroyuki Ito's ode to Meeno is lovely, and perfect alongside the Manning book.
Stream of Life, Clarice Lispector
What an odd, wonderful little book. Some might be bothered by Lispector's stream of consciousness, cluttered with mundanities and resistant to linear narrative, but to me, they make the nuggets of wisdom all the more evocative, since you have to prospect for them among talk of placentophagy, the character of different kinds of flowers, and so on.
What of this plotlessness? I'll let Lispector speak for herself:
Does my life have no plot? I’m unexpectedly fragmentary. I’m little by little. My story is to live. And I’m not afraid of failure. Let failure annihilate me, I want the glory of falling. ... This isn’t a story because I don’t know stories as such, but only know how to keep on speaking and doing: it’s a story of instants that flash by, like fugitive tracks seen from a train window.
How Literature Saved My Life, David Shields
Much food for thought in this screed, which argues that art is a "lunge at redemption." We're always grasping, never reaching, Shields seems to say; and yet ...:
I wanted literature to assuage human loneliness, but nothing can assuage human loneliness. Literature doesn't lie about this---which is what makes it essential.
Battleborn, Claire Vaye Watkins
In Watkins's Battleborn, a short-story collection, we hear dispatches from the great, glittering American West---breathtaking, heartbreaking commentaries on the world today. (Plus one piece about forty-niners at Angels Camp, mere miles from the Sierra town my family hails from; "The Diggings," though of a different era than most other stories in the collection, made an odd sort of sense in that it, too, tells of great hopes dashed by the world's cruel venality.)
Beautiful writing; Watkins is certainly a writer I'll keep my eye on.
How to Be a Woman, Caitlin Moran
After struggling to find myself in How Should a Person Be?, I thought I'd try something a little more authoritative: this, Caitlin Moran says, is how to be a woman. And for her, it turns out, trying to find something to be is almost beside the point: "I thought all my efforts should be concentrated on being fabulous, rather than doing fabulous things." (Emphasis mine.)
That's right; there really isn't any one right path for the modern lady of means. Except you probably shouldn't try to live up to a rigid standard of perfection:
The thing that has given me the most relief and freedom in my adult years has been, finally, once and for all giving up on the idea that I might secretly be, or will one day become, a princess. Accepting you're just some perfectly ordinary woman who is going to have to crack on, work hard, and be polite in order to get anything done is---once you've gotten over the crippling disappointment of your thundering ordinariness---incredibly liberating.
This perfectly ordinary woman thinks that sounds downright sensible.
HHhH, Laurent Binet
Laurent Binet's HHhH, a historical fiction that loudly grapples with its own classification as such, tells the story of Operation Anthropoid---the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, one of the architects of the Final Solution in Hitler's regime.
I struggled a bit with the odd self-awareness of the narrator (ostensibly Binet himself, at least according to an interview he gave to the Guardian), but it was a captivating story, interventions to discuss literary theory and the burdens of truth notwithstanding.
"The dead are dead, and it makes no difference to them whether I pay homage to their deeds. But for us, the living, it does mean something," Binet writes.
This morning, I went for a run. My husband stopped at an ATM, and I caught my breath on the corner, listlessly observing the boarded-up houses, an old payphone booth with the receiver ripped off. On one of the booth's metal planes, someone had scrawled a note with a permanent marker. The note was in German. I took a picture because, for one reason or another, it bothered me. At home, on the Internet, I discovered that the words I saw were the official motto of the SS. A strange coincidence, to be sure, that I was reading a book so clearly situated in World War II, the time of the Nazis. I reflected and held the history of it closer to me.
"Memory is of no use to the remembered, only to those who remember. We build ourselves with memory and console ourselves with memory." Grand reclaimings of the genre of historical fiction aside, HHhH is a provocative call to those of us slipping into the close comfort of the here and now.
The Fifty Year Sword, Mark Z Danielewski
Danielewski's eerie tale, a ghost story of sorts, is not only an excellent, disarming novella but also a pleasure as a physical object: the text is interspersed with stitched illustrations from Atelier Z. The creepy pricks of so many needles serve to heighten the tension at an awkward dinner party, interrupted by a Story Teller who weaves through his narrative for a group of orphans in attendance.
Unbroken, Laura Hillenbrand
Hillenbrand's biography of Louis Zamperini, a one-time Olympic runner and a World War II POW in Japan, surprised me. Given its popular success, I thought it would be much more of a feel-good story; don't get me wrong, it lives up to its title -- Zamperini is indomitable. But it doesn't shy away from a very dark time in Zamperini's life, and the unflinching look is both intensely uncomfortable and necessarily enlightening.
It's Kind of a Funny Story, Ned Vizzini
A nice bit of YA that takes on mental-health problems in a charming, endearing manner. Perhaps it occludes some of the grittier aspects of depression; perhaps that's fine. This book offers a jumping-off point for discussing issues sans melodrama, etc.
Nine Months, Paula Bomer
Your body is just a chamber of horrors, and pregnancy is an opportunity to showcase the horrible hold the physical world has over us. A good reminder that expecting isn't all color-coordinated onesies and gender-reveal parties.
Zazen, Vanessa Veselka
I loved the narrator's voice in Zazen, a book that looks at one young woman's sorting out of the world in an unnamed city in an indeterminate year, when bombs are going off across the country and the sands seem to shift beneath her feet.
She tries to map the world by tracking stories of people immolating themselves, crafting small memorials to them on the slips of paper found inside fortune cookies: such an odd detail, and yet so perfectly graspable (so many odd ways in which we try to make sense of the spaces we inhabit). She reflects on images of people burning:
"I took a few breaths and tried to calm down. Raina says nothing's ever really wrong it's just the story we tell ourselves. I think it's the other way around. But I tried anyway. The woman crouching in the smoke had pockets full of bobbleheads. The man and the young girl had just shared a hot dog and arena nachos. It wasn't the war. It was just a game. But of course it was the war, I could hear it breathing under the net."
The story drags at times, sure, but the book overall is strangely compelling. And though often bleak, Veselka's message is ultimately one of hope; amid violence, disappointment, disaffection, you can choose love nonetheless.
Monsieur Proust's Library, Anka Muhlstein
My review is up at the Coffin Factory's O-Bits blog.
Tenth of December, George Saunders
I'm not as gung-ho about George Saunders as everyone else seems to be; I didn't love all of the stories in this collection. But "Tenth of December," the final piece (and the one for which the collection is named), is a masterpiece writ small, as many others have already said.
Oddly enough, though, my favorite of his stories in this book was "Sticks." It's quite short, the tale of a man who adorns a metal pole in his yard with holiday-themed decorations: "Super Bowl week the pole was dressed in a jersey ... On Fourth of July the pole was Uncle Sam, on Veterans Day a soldier, on Halloween a ghost." It's a gem, an oddity, and I love how effectively he can sketch the family's life when showing so little of it.