Month: September 2024

The Personal Librarian, by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray

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I recently toured Ventfort Hall Mansion and Gilded Age Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Many folks might recognise it as the location used for the film of The Cider House Rules. I was intrigued because the house was built in 1893 for George and Sarah Morgan, Sarah being the sister of J.P. Morgan, and I happened to be in the middle of reading this story of J.P.’s librarian.

The tour was fascinating, with much detailed information and background. I was drawn to a display about the book and its protagonist Belle da Costa Greene, hired in 1905 as Morgan’s personal librarian to build and curate his library, and the first director of the Morgan Library and Museum after his death.

Belle, as we know now, was a woman of color passing as White. Even as a White woman, her being awarded this position shocked the male-dominated world of the early twentieth century. She went on to become fabulously successful. Intelligent, witty and well educated, she outmaneuvered others to acquire rare and valuable books for the library.

The authors have filled out the few records of Belle’s life to create a stirring portrait of this complicated woman. Her father Richard Greener was the first Black graduate of Harvard, a lawyer and professor who worked for civil rights causes all his life. However, her mother Genevieve decided that the only way for her children to succeed in a prejudiced world was to pass for White. To that end, she moved with the children to New York City and changed their name to da Costa Greene to bolster her claim of Portuguese heritage.

The accounts of Belle’s complicated relationship with Morgan, the enmity of his daughter Anne, and Belle’s adventures in the world of rare books keep the story moving. The real driver of the story, though, is her inner life as she wrestles with her identity and preserving her role, including leaving behind her birth name Marion.

Of course, we don’t know how the real Belle felt about any of it. This is historical fiction. However, its consistency and psychological acumen make it thoroughly believable. I have some qualms about books like this one that interpret the life of a real person, someone who isn’t here to correct mistakes. However, without such books, few of us would know about someone like Belle, long forgotten by history.

While the second half of the book dragged a bit as she goes from success to success, it is still an enjoyable read, and a good complement to Anderson Cooper’s Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty, which I read recently. In Stockbridge, I learned a bit about its other Gilded Age “cottages” which, like the New York mansions in Vanderbilt, competed to outdo each other in size and excessive expenditure. And all, including Ventfort, were quickly disposed of by succeeding generations due to bankruptcy or lack of interest. Ozymandias indeed.

How do you feel about historical fiction based on real people?

The Girl Who Wrote in Silk, by Kelli Estes

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Inara Erickson faces a difficult return to Orcas Island in the San Juan Islands. A childhood of wonderful summers visiting her Aunt Dahlia ended when her mother was killed in a car accident on Orcas. When Aunt Dahlia dies and leaves the large house and estate to her, Inara has to overcome her reluctance and get the property ready to sell. Then she can take up the corporate job her father has arranged for her, and make use of her new business degree.

 

However, she begins to fall under the island’s spell again and, while working in the house, finds a beautifully embroidered silk sleeve. She wonders who could have done this spectacular work, why it had been cut from a robe, and how it came to be hidden here.

 

In an alternate story line, a second generation immigrant in Seattle named Mei Lien lives with her father and grandmother above their dry goods shop until a violent mob ousts them. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, reflecting the anti-immigrant emotions common once the Chinese were no longer needed to build the railroads, results in the mob bent on ethnic cleansing. They force hundreds of Chinese residents onto a ship captained by Duncan Cameron, supposedly to be sent to San Francisco and then to China.

 

This debut novel has a lot to recommend it. Based on true events, the descriptions of Mei Lien’s life are particularly rich. Everyone in my book club found things they enjoyed, such as the setting on Orcas Island, the detailed description of the embroidery, the deep dive into Chinese spirituality, and the historical information about the plight of the Chinese residents—so relevant to today.

 

At the same time, we were put off by the multitude of coincidences powering the plot, as well as some plot points that were just too unrealistic. Also, while we were captivated by the first part, our interest waned as the story began to concentrate on the two young women’s rather predictable romances. Most of us felt that, instead of a dual timeline, a novel about Mei Lien alone would have been something really special.  

 

Still, our curiosity about the sleeve and our fondness for Inara and Mei Lien carried us through, and we all concluded that we enjoyed the book and were glad we read it. I, for one, look forward to the author’s future novels, as her skills—already great—grow even more.

 

Do you like dual timeline stories? Can you recommend a good one you’ve read?

The Lighthouse Keeper’s Daughter, by Hazel Gaynor

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I first heard of Hazel Gaynor through her partnership with Heather Webb. They are co-authors of a number of delightful novels, including Meet Me in Monaco about Grace Kelly’s wedding. Here, Gaynor again gives us historical fiction based on real events. In one of two braided stories, twenty-two-year-old Grace Darling helps her father operate the Longstone Lighthouse on the Farne Islands in Northeast England. The family lives there, as well as being responsible for the light itself.

My sister Thomasin used to say she imagined the stairwell was a long vein running from the heart of the lighthouse. In one way or another, we have all attached human qualities to these old stone walls so that it has become another member of the family, not just a building to house us.

When a terrible storm erupts in 1838, Grace and her parents are the only ones home, her brothers elsewhere. When the paddle steamer Forfarshire is wrecked on the rocks, she insists that she and her father should try to rescue the survivors despite the raging sea and high winds. That feat made her famous, to her dismay, bringing reporters, tourists, and portrait painters to their previously lonely outpost.

One hundred years later, nineteen-year-old Matilda finds herself banished to another lighthouse in Newport, Rhode Island, to spare her parents back in England the shame of her unwed pregnancy. The lighthouse is run by a distant relative, a grim, reclusive woman.

As Matilda tries to find a way to connect to Harriet, she becomes intrigued by the lighthouse itself and soon begins to learn about its history and operation. In a trove of family artifacts she learns about her ancestor, Grace Darling. She’s also curious about Harriet’s mysteries and secrets.

The 1938 New England Hurricane, one of the deadliest and most destructive ever to hit the United States, requires both women to summon reserves of courage and love if they and the lighthouse are to survive.

In spite of the hurricanes and other tragedies, this novel was the absorbing comfort read I was looking for. I couldn’t help but cheer on these women who worked so hard and set themselves such high standards. The relationships within the families and with those in the wider world were presented with nuance and depth.

I might have liked a little more development of some of the secondary characters, but that’s a minor quibble. There were a few anachronisms in each of the time periods, which gave me a chuckle.

Still, I treasured the insights about what it takes to operate a lighthouse in each time period, and the attendant duties, such as rescuing shipwrecked people. I had no idea that women had been lighthouse keepers, though—of course—why not?

Like Gatsby and Woolf’s Mrs. Ramsey, I used to live with a distant light, a lighthouse on the Chesapeake Bay that lit my bedroom and dreams for years. I once tried to swim to it. It seemed so close! But it was not; it was beyond my power to reach.

So Gaynor had me at “lighthouse.” Then came the bonus of just the sort of story I was looking for: one that held my attention, gave me a break from the anxieties of current events, and even taught me some things I didn’t know.

Have you read a novel or a nonfiction book about a lighthouse and/or its keeper?

Burning Questions, by Margaret Atwood

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Subtitled Essays and Occasional Pieces, 2004 to 2021, this is Atwood’s third collection of essays, speeches, book introductions, and reviews. What astonished me was how readable this heterogeneous collection is. Of course, we have Atwood’s voice throughout: intelligent, calm, learned, self-deprecating, and witty.

In today’s world, where so many people value opinions and beliefs over fact, it is a huge relief to communicate with someone who actually believes in science. Both of her parents were scientists–an entomologist and a nutritionist–and she spent much of her youth in the woods of Northern Ontario. She talks about the family pulling over when an infestation was spotted so that they could collect the invading critters. “Other families stopped for ice-cream cones. Ours stopped for infestations.”

That early influence shows in her concern with the threats to our environment, both in her fiction and her nonfiction, including a number of pieces in this collection. She writes of how this concern fueled her Oryx & Crake trilogy and her MaddAddam trilogy, as well as a moving tribute to Rachel Carson, calling her “a pivotal figure of the twentieth century” and “Saint Rachel.”

Another theme that threads through this collection is the way autocracies try to silence writers and control women. She has been a force in founding Pen Canada and acted as its president in the 1980s. In “If We Don’t Defend Free Speech, We Live in Tyranny” she writes about the attack on Salman Rushdie and the murder of translator Hotoshi Igarashi. In another piece she states that “There is nothing that repressive governments desire more than imposed silence . . . secrecy is an important tool not only of power but of atrocity.”

She generously continues to write about The Handmaid’s Tale, noting that “absolutist governments have always taken an inordinate interest in the reproductive capabilities of women.” She adds that writing a dystopia from a woman’s point of view “does not make The Handmaid’s Tale a ‘feminist dystopia,’ except insofar as giving a woman a voice and an inner life will always be considered ‘feminist’ by those who think women ought not to have these things.”

These pieces are not all darkness with a glimmer of wit. In “Literature and the Environment” she writes that “as long as we have hope—and we still do have hope—we will be telling stories, and—if we have the time and the materials—we’ll be setting them down; because the telling of stories, and the wish to listen to them, transmit them, and derive meaning from them, is built into us as human beings.”

Indeed, the pieces I most appreciated were about how essential the arts are to our well-being and about writing in particular. Parsing out her approach to these short pieces taught me so much about her methodology. Often she starts with a clear statement of purpose: “I’ll divide my talk into three parts, and I’ll even tell you what they are, just so you know what’s coming.” That’s from a speech honoring the Department of Forestry’s centennial. I’m touched by how, despite her blockbuster status, she’s willing to turn up and speak at so many events.

After the statement of purpose, she wanders here and there in the best tradition of essay-writing. She includes asides, rhetorical questions, digressions, allusions. She explores the question without answering it, instead opening our minds—gently and respectfully. I also especially appreciated the pieces about other authors and about her late husband, author Graeme Gibson: both joyful moments and mor trying times as he drifted deeper into dementia.

While some readers may be unnerved by this collection’s length, diversity, and chronological structure (rather than thematic), I found it a joy to read. Most of the pieces are quite short, making it a perfect bedtime book: you can read a few pieces and chuckle at her quips before you turn out the light.

I’m grateful to Atwood for collecting these pieces—no small task—and putting them out for us to absorb. In fact, for a more global understanding of the issues facing us, their interconnectedness, and how we can move forward, this book cannot be beat.

What have you read by Margaret Atwood? Her novels, poems, and/or essays?

Oracle Night, by Paul Auster

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I’ve been meaning to read Auster’s novels for a while and even have a couple of his books on my to-be-read shelf. However, I decided to start with this short one from the library.

As Brooklyn novelist Sidney Orr recovers from a life-threatening illness, he begins to walk around his neighborhood. Attracted to a Chinese stationery shop he’d never noticed before, he is drawn to a blank notebook with a blue cover. For the first time since the onset of his illness, he enters his tiny writing room and begins writing in the notebook.

The story pouring out of him, which he titles Oracle Night, tells of a New York editor who one day simply up and leaves his life, traveling by random chance to St. Louis. There Nick meets Ed, an elderly cab driver who is in poor health. Finding his wife—thinking him dead—has canceled his credit cards, Nick begins working for Ed, helping him reorder his collection of telephone books stored in an underground bunker.

Meanwhile, Sidney’s marriage is suffering; his wife Grace is behaving oddly. His friend and mentor John Trause, twenty-some years older and a longtime friend of Grace and her family, is acting strange as well. Trause (yes, an anagram) had been the one to suggest the story behind Oracle Night to Sidney, based on a brief incident in The Maltese Falcon. Even more mysterious things begin to happen, such as Grace dreaming about Sidney’s story and Sidney himself disappearing from his study when he is certain he’s been there all along.

Auster includes footnotes of varying length, usually containing backstory about a person or incident, which amused me. I also enjoyed the many literary references. So it was fun to read, though the characters were rather flat, and the novel more of a production to appreciate than a story to immerse oneself in. The similarities between the characters and Auster himself and the whole fiction-versus-reality theme seem a bit old hat, even for 2003 when this novel was first published.

In the summary above I’ve barely scratched the surface of the many interwoven layers of plot in this story within story within story. I did appreciate the resulting semi-chaos and the way it reflected Sidney’s growing distrust of reality. However, the various layers never quite cohered, and the turn to melodrama at the end rather ruined the book for me.

Will I try another Auster novel? Sure. Can you recommend a good one for me to read next?