justin

I have often said that I was born with “the happy gene”. Other than during adolescence, a difficult time for most everybody, I have generally maintained a cheerful outlook. When bad things happen to me, rather than cursing my luck or sinking into depression, I usually think first of practical ways to ameliorate the situation. If that proves impossible, I tend to start thinking of what I can learn from the experience. Of course, I get outraged by injustice or dishonesty and am saddened by the trials of others or the loss of friends. I can also be quite grumpy if I haven't gotten enough sleep. But overall I'm pretty even-tempered. This attitude isn't the result of any skill or effort on my part. As I say, I just seem to have been born happy.

So I was surprised near the end of Benton's memoir to come across the same diagnosis: she too says that she was born with “the happy gene”. Diagnosed at five with Gaucher's disease, a genetic disorder that affects the liver, spleen, lungs, and bone marrow, Benton's life has been one of great physical pain and increasing disability. At 44, she was also diagnosed with Young-Onset Parkinson's disease. Blows such as these seem like a recipe for bitterness and depression, but Benton decided at a young age that she would “make the best of a bad situation; put a smile on my face, be cheerful and in good spirits.” Judging from this book, her efforts have been successful.

Her illness plays a very small role in this memoir. Rather, it acts as a backdrop to a series of gentle, mostly humorous anecdotes about everyday life. For example, she tells the story of meeting her future husband when, having torn his trousers just before an important meeting, he happens to duck into her office in search of a sewing kit. Some years later at the beach when she and their daughter became caught in a rip tide, he dives in fully clothed to rescue them. A perhaps not-uncommon experience, but she relates the story and her other anecdotes in a warm and charming voice. Although her subject matter is different, the tone of the book reminds me of All Creatures Great and Small. Rather than the experiences of a country vet, Benton writes about a woman's experiences—a “magic laundry basket” that refills no matter how often it is emptied or puzzlement over “one size fits all” clothes—and life events that we can all relate to such as the birth of her daughter and the loss of her father.

I was especially taken with the combination of humor and sadness in the description of the descent of her once strong and capable mother into dementia. She tells of her mother trying to change television channels with the cordless phone and repeatedly bringing in loads of laundry and rehanging them outside. I think this chapter appealed to me because a dear friend is going through the same thing with her mother just now and not letting her sadness prevent her from laughing at the often absurd goings-on.

When Benton does mention her diseases, she generally uses a comic approach. For instance, she describes the many bizarre uses she finds for the IV stand on wheels that she has at home to deliver the medication for Gaucher disease: holding ironed shirts on their hangers, drying laundry, carrying strips of quilting fabric attached with clothespins. She parses the the papers that come with her prescriptions, wondering if the caution to avoid operating heavy machinery could be used to persuade someone else to do the family laundry. She also finds a peculiar warning, that the medication could cause “obsessive compulsive shopping tendencies”, and concludes that it constitutes an excuse for a new pair of shoes.

Benton's purpose in writing this book is to challenge the stigma of disability. Too often, people seeing her in a wheelchair speak in loud, overly enunciated voices as though she were deaf or mentally deficient. Sometimes they speak about her in the third person to her companion. There is also the assumption that she must be miserable or angry because of her physical disability. Just because she suffers great pain or needs crutches or a wheelchair, she is no less a person with the same joys and sorrows as anyone else. The truth of this statement is amply demonstrated by her pleasant book. It is a light read, but I enjoyed the time spent in her company.

I'm taking a break from books this week to participate in the Next Big Thing Blog Hop. It is a chance for authors to tell you what they’re working on. The author answers 10 questions about their next book, and tags the person who first tagged them, plus at least 5 other authors.
I was tagged by Christine Stewart whose novel, Rose and Jesse, is based on a true family story. Check it out: www.therealwriter.com

Here are my answers to the questions:

What is the working title of your book?
Under a Pigeon's Wing. The epigraph is from Elizabeth Bishop: “Winter lives under a pigeon's wing.”

Where did the idea come from for the book?
A young friend of mine shared her plans to live simply—and I do mean simply—in order to have more funds to donate to worthy causes. While I admired her heart, I recognised that putting other people's needs/desires before our own is a common issue for women. Since my character is struggling to get out of poverty and has a child, her decisions have life-or-death consequences.

What genre does your book fall under?
Literary Fiction

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?
I never think about this! Hmm. Maybe Dakota Fanning, Sarah Shahi, Joaquin Phoenix, Mark Harmon, Helen Mirren, Linda Hunt.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?
Cat Kelly, a young, single mother, longs to escape the dangers of a life of poverty in a dead-end mill town but can't resist sacrificing her dreams to help others.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?
Not sure yet.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?
Still working on it.

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?
Ladder of Years, by Ann Tyler; Abide with Me, by Elizabeth Strout; Affliction, by Russell Banks; Empire Falls, by Richard Russo

Who or What inspired you to write this book?
As a former welfare mother, as described in my memoir, Innocent, I continue to be drawn to stories that tell the truth about poverty, avoiding the saccharine Horatio Alger myths or the hurtful stereotypes. I want to celebrate the courage and persistence of the people I know who are just barely making it from check to check.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?
Humorous bits and eccentric characters lighten the drama as Cat tries to keep her new job, her tiny step forward, from being eliminated. When you're poor, even a small setback can be disastrous. Cat is lucky to be able to call on the help of her friends as she confronts one crisis after another. Then, unexpectedly, love comes knocking at her door.

More links to the next chain of bloggers/writers coming soon!

Kirra Antrobus's Thoughtful blog

This novel begins with 19-year-old Richard Issych waking up from a suicide attempt, his brain still fogged from the pills he took. With powerful prose the author takes us directly into Richard's mind, awhirl with disconnected thoughts, memories and worries. Gradually the haze diminishes and he realises/remembers that he is in a psychiatric hospital, persuaded by his parents to sign himself in. Everything about the place drives him crazy: the absurd rules, the nurses who talk to him in condescending baby-talk, the scary patients like Eugene who hears the angels and Joey who constantly paces and moans.

Most of all Richard hates being imprisoned. At first he is not allowed to leave his room. Then when he can venture out, he must eat his meals in his room. The nuances of life in a psychiatric hospital come at us through Richard's eyes. Frantic to erase his existence, he is stymied by the stainless steel mirrors in the bathroom, the absence of belts, the locked doors and constant surveillance.

Eventually he begins to make a place for himself, helped by the friendship offered by his roommate and hindered—he believes—by the visits of his willfully blind mother. Like a meandering trail of acorns, we find pieces of the lonely and isolated life and the barriers between him and his parents. In the hospital, Richard cannot remain isolated. He must learn how to forge relationships, not only with the doctors and inmates, but also with his mother and father.

Teen angst is not something I would normally seek out, but the power of Jacoby's prose and the emotional truth of Richard's journey are irresistible. As a debut novel, there are some structural weaknesses. Also, the stream-of-consciousness prose, used primarily in the beginning and then tapering off as Richard moves forward, may not be for everyone, but I think it works given the boy's fractured consciousness and difficult emotions.

Full disclosure: I met the author at a writing workshop a few years ago and am reviewing the book at his request.

If you liked Girl, Interrupted and wondered how a boy would feel in that situation, this is the book for you. The emotional journey of this shy and sensitive young man is leavened with humor and beset by fear, but in the end holds a powerful truth.

I picked up this novel about the three Andreas sisters, daughters of a professor whose specialty is Shakespeare and has named them after heroines from the master's plays for three reasons. I myself am one of three sisters and am curious about the shifting alliances and effects of birth order on these relationships. Also, like the Andreas family, I believe that solutions to all problems may be found in books. Finally, least in importance but first in capturing my eye, the cover features an attractive graphic and clear text, though I was a little put off by the title.

Weird here carries its ancient meaning of fate, and underlying the rather frivolous story of romantic and familial relationships are questions of destiny and choice. The oldest sister, Rose (short for Rosalind), still lives in the rural college town of Barnwell, Ohio where her highest ambitions are to marry her sweet fiancé, teach math at the same college where her father holds forth, and help her absent-minded parents. Bean (short for Bianca) lives a fast life in New York City, having gotten as far away as possible from sleepy Barnwell. The youngest, Cordy (short for Cordelia), drifts around the country following bands or simply the wind, part of today's youthful tribe of travelers.

The sisters are brought home by their mother's illness and by their own sense of having failed in creating their own lives.

Weighing the things I liked about the book against those I didn't like, I conclude that it is a good light read, certainly appropriate for the insomniac wee hours I spent reading it. I enjoyed the family's literary wordplay and apt quotations from the bard, though some people may find them a bit much. I liked the prickly relationship between the sisters: much more like my experience than those saccharine sisters in some novels. On the other hand the characters are rather stereotypical and the plot a bit predictable. Humor and some interesting minor characters keep the story from bogging down.

Brown employs a peculiar point of view in this book: a collective voice for the sisters. Hence, a good part of the book is narrated in first person plural: “How can we explain what books and reading mean to our family, the gift of libraries, of pages?” Even when we go into a close third person to delve into one sister's story, the collective voice sometimes offers commentary. Like a chorus in a Greek play, the collective “we” interrupts the story, interpreting what's happening, providing background information. This unusual choice is intended, I assume, to remind us that even as the sisters seem to be shooting off in opposite directions, they remain tied together.

For me it had a distancing effect. Just as I would start to get involved in one of the sister's problems, the voice would pull me out, hauling me up to the clouds where I could observe like an Olympian but not actually care very much. Still, it is an interesting experiment, and as I say, I stayed with the book to the end. Have you ever read a book using this point of view? What did you think of it?

Memory certainly works in mysterious ways. I was reading Abide with Me, by Elizabeth Strout, author of one of my favorite books, Olive Kitteridge. Abide with Me follows Tyler Caskey, the minister of the small, New England town of West Arnett in the winter of 1959. Burdened with grief, he lives with his young daughter, Katherine, in a farmhouse a little ways outside of town while his younger daughter, Jeanne, lives with his mother in the nearby town of Shirley Falls. Katherine has barely spoken since her mother's death and is struggling with school.

With a deft touch Strout draws the complex and shifting relationships of small-town life, alliances made and abandoned, even as she makes the reader feel the isolation of a New England farmhouse. I love the quick details that paint a character—a red knit dress, pink walls like Bazooka gum—and her descriptions of winter:

It was still October when the first snow fell. It came in the afternoon, light as white dandelion thistles being dropped from high in the sky. They took their time reaching ground, so light and sparse they floated. But there was a quiet steadiness to the snow, and by late afternoon, a soft covering lay over places where the ground swelled.

I've known snows like that. Strout's perception of her characters and her grave and steady use of the scalpel to reveal them rivals Anne Tyler. One of the interesting touches is the voice that starts the book and returns occasionally. It is the voice of a storyteller, some unnamed local person, who is telling you, the reader, about what happened to Tyler that winter. It shouldn't work, but it does. This is a wonderful book that I highly recommend.

Reading it, I thought, as I mentioned, of Anne Tyler. Because it was about a minister, I thought about Marianne Robinson's Gilead and Home, although this book is less about religion and faith than those two books.

And I thought about Ethan Frome, a book I haven't read since middle school. I remembered being bored by it then and dismayed by the unrelenting New England winter so vividly portrayed, not that that stopped me from later falling in love with New England winters myself. But I remembered the book being about a grizzled and cantankerous old man holed up in an isolated farmhouse with his young daughter, a bit like Tyler and Katherine.

Imagine my surprise when I started rereading Ethan Frome to find out that it is not the book I remembered! Frome is indeed grizzled, though only 52, and he does live in an isolated, New England farmhouse. The story also shares Strout's voice of being recounted by someone years after the events of the story, though here the narrator is identified: a visitor to the town of Starkfield.

However, it is not the story of a man and his daughter, but rather of Ethan and his wife, Zenobia, called Zeena, and her young cousin, Mattie Silver, who comes to live with them almost as a servant after she is left penniless and alone. Young Ethan meant to leave Starkfield behind, taking a year-long course at a technical school in Worcester, MA, but his father's death brought him back to the hard-scrabble farm and mill. His mother gradually drifted into dementia and his cousin Zeena came to help him with her.

It's a story of wanting more than you have, seeing your dreams just out of reach but grasping for them anyway. Although I prefer Strout's cautious optimism to Wharton's inevitable tragedy, I am glad I reread this book.

I recently started a novel with a lovely and intriguing cover, an interesting title, and glowing blurbs. Before I'd read even twenty pages, though, we were on our third time period and third set of characters. Maybe my attention span has gotten shorter, but that just required too much up-front work from me, and I discarded the book without going further.

I think this is one reason why I like mysteries: they stay closer to the classical unities than most novels. There is one main action: solving the murder. Mysteries usually are centered on a limited number of settings: a police station or detective's office, the scene of the crime, the den of the prime suspect. And they normally cover no more than a few days. Now, I'm not a stickler. I love P.D. James's books which sometimes don't get around to the murder till halfway through the book. I expect the detective to range far and wide during the investigation. I welcome flashbacks and the layering of past and present. But I want to invest myself in characters whom I'll be able to accompany for the whole journey. A series, like James's Dalgliesh series, offers an even wider scope for the journey and an immediate commitment to familiar characters.

This 1999 book is the first in Nadel's series set in Istanbul featuring Çetin Ikmen, a police inspector who smokes and drinks brandy steadily throughout the day leaving a trail of nasty overfull ashtrays and empty bottles littering his office. His sergeant Mehmet Süleyman, a pretty boy who is trying to resist the marriage arranged by his overbearing mother, tries to tidy up after his boss but only succeeds in making a bigger mess. They are called in to a particularly brutal murder in an impoverished section of town. The gruesome details of the murder of an elderly Jewish man have neo-Nazi overtones, a shocking development in Istanbul's relatively tolerant culture.

Much of the story follows Robert Cornelius, an Englishman teaching in a local school. Cornelius reminded me of the acronym from Old Filth: failed in London; try Hong Kong. The students in his Istanbul classroom may be bored and lazy, but at least they are not vicious like the British schoolboys who sent him packing. Cornelius is walking home from his classes when he spies his bafflingly remote girlfriend sneaking out of a building, the building which he later learns is the scene of the murder.

This is Nadel's first book, so some awkwardness in the writing and pacing may perhaps be forgiven. The Istanbul settings are vividly drawn, the author having spent much time in Turkey. There are plenty of plot twists, the last one being a bit too far-fetched for me, but not impossible. Nadel has gone on to write 14 more books in the Ikmen series, along with five other books in two more series, all of which seem to be quite popular, so clearly she has perfected her craft. And even with this first book, hey, I finished it!

Yes, I was sufficiently engaged to stay with it, although I did not find Ikmen appealing and was dismayed about halfway through the book to find him turning to mysticism for answers. What interested me about him were his family. His devotion to his wife, Fatma, pregnant with their ninth child, at first seems incomprehensible given her coldness and constant disapproval, but later scenes reveal a tenderness between them that touched me. Ikmen's father lives with them, angry and complaining most of the time, but helping with the children when asked and revealing a wealth of knowledge when consulted by his son. Their mutual respect amid the difficulties of old age and relative poverty is brought out with great subtlety.

Will I read more books in the series? Perhaps. I certainly enjoyed the settings, having gone through a little Istanbul phase a few years ago. The next time I discard a disappointing novel, I will be happy to turn to a book like this.

This memoir recounts Dubus's life growing up poor in the 1970s in Haverill, an impoverished mill town on the Merrimack River, an environment I'm very familiar with from my years in Worcester. Dubus's father, a writer and professor at Bradford College across the river, left the family when Andre was 11. Burdened with the responsibility he's undertaken to protect his two sisters and younger brother while their embattled mother works to support the family, Andre struggles with what he believes to be his own cowardice.

There are all kinds of reasons for writing a memoir, such as to record your life for your children or to work through a difficult time in your past. A memoir for the general public, though, must be about more than “I had a hard life.” I've been surprised by how many people in some of my online writing groups are working on memoirs because of an unhappy divorce or a bout with cancer or a death in the family; they believe that an account of their experience will help others going through the same thing. I expect that was true of the first fifty divorce/cancer/death memoirs, but wonder how many more can find a readership. As writer Aleksandar Hemon said in an interview in The Writer's Chronicle, “the confessional memoir . . . genre is practically dead because it's always the same thing: addiction, despair, some kind of abuse. It has become a form unto itself. How many addiction memoirs can you read?”

To appeal to the general public, I see three possibilities: a memoir has to be written by a celebrity (or a ghostwriter pretending to be the celebrity), contain utterly amazing writing (see Angela's Ashes, The Glass Castle), or address some larger issue. Dubus became somewhat of a celebrity when his novel House of Sand and Fog was selected as an Oprah book. The writing here is good but not take-your-breath-away great. That leaves a larger theme.

One could make the case that the book is primarily about his relationship with his father. The book starts with his father deserting the family and ends with his father's death, in between recounting their difficult and often misunderstood reconnections. By itself, this might not lift the story out of the merely personal, though certainly the issue of disappearing fathers and abandoned boys is one that is of great consequence to our society.

It is a related theme that interests me more, though. Preyed upon my neighborhood bullies and without a father's protection, young Andre turns to violence, embracing weight training, street fighting and, eventually, boxing as the way to protect himself, his family, and anyone else he sees being bullied. The most moving part of the book for me recounts why and how he gradually turned away from this path.

I was also interested in how he turned to writing. With my writer's hat on, I have to admit to a couple of quibbles with the book. As writers we are told to include sensory details. However, stacking them up at the beginning of a scene, as Dubus often does, listing every smell and then every sound, etc., is not as effective as spreading them out a bit. I listened to the book on CD read by the author, which meant that the pronunciations and accents were correct. Unfortunately, though, the author's monotone voice tended to make me zone out; a professional actor would have held my attention better.

As a mom, I was disturbed by the concentration on the father with very little mention of the mother who did not abandon her son, who worked sometimes menial jobs to support him and his siblings, and who actually came to his rescue when he was bullied. She is just a shadowy figure, away at work too much to see the trouble Andre and his siblings are getting themselves into. I realise that would be a very different book, and that the great strength of this book comes from its examination of what it means to be a man in the United States. Still, my heart goes out to her, along with my respect, and I hope her children recognise the enormity of what she gave them.

There is a happy ending here. The four children do manage to grow out of the drugs and fighting and inappropriate sexual liaisons to become contented adults who are fulfilling the promise buried under the difficulties of a life of poverty. This, too, is a good lesson for me: to look at a teen-aged drug dealer or hooligan and know that it is not too late for the child within.

This collection of short stories set in Pakistan's cities and rural villages make up Mueenuddin's first book, a fact that perhaps influenced my reaction. I thought the book very good for a first effort, though perhaps not good enough to be a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, both of which distinctions are trumpeted on the cover. It's not the first time my opinion has differed from that of prize judges and surely won't be the last.

The characters in these eight stories range from servants to villagers to modern young people racing from party to party. Some characters turn up in multiple stories, helping to tie the collection together. Women do what they must to survive, such as Saleema who wherever she works takes the cook as her lover in order to get extra food. Love arrives as an unexpected bonus but doesn't last. The characters I enjoyed the most were the eccentrics, such as Rezak who carries his homemade shack, a little wooden box “faced with tin and mounted on thick legs”, to wherever his next job is located. Or Nawabdin who fixes electric motors by circling them, drinking tea next to them, and beating on them with hammers yet somehow manages to improvise a fix. He reminds me of my friend Jonah, who while working as a potwasher and faced with a particularly stubborn burnt patch took the pot for a ride in the EasyGo. It seemed to work.

Some members of my book club were surprised by the cheerful cheating and outright theft seemingly practiced by everyone while the patron, K. K. Harouni, the one character who appears in all the stories, believes that his people love him too much to steal from him. So bills are padded; things disappear, and judges must be bribed. Even the thieves, though, are outraged when someone steals from them. A couple of the stories were a bit too elliptical for us; even putting our heads together we could not figure out the significance of certain sentences nor why the characters reacted as they did.

Although I enjoyed the stories, I found them somewhat repetitive. As one person in my book club said, the stories all follow a similar pattern: the unhappy protagonist begins to find a place of safety and sometimes joy before descending into complete misery. Several people complained about the unvaryingly gloomy outcomes, but as one person pointed out perhaps that is simply the reality of life in this area. In his Author's Note Mueenuddin says the stories are based on the stories he lived through while managing his family's farm in Pakistan and on his childhood experiences in Lahore and on the farm. The descriptive details and rhythms of speech embedded in his memory lend authenticity to the stories. For example, in one story Nawabdin goes to beg Harouni for a motorcycle:

“Sir, as you know, your lands stretch from here to the Indus, and on these lands are fully seventeen tube wells, and to tend these seventeen tube wells there is but one man, me, your servant. In your service I have earned these gray hairs”—here he bowed his head to show the gray—“and now I cannot fulfill my duties as I should. Enough, sir, enough. I beg you, forgive me my weakness. Better a darkened house and proud hunger within than disgrace in the light of day. Release me, I ask you, I beg you”.

The old man, well accustomed to these sorts of speeches, though not usually this florid, filed away at his nails and waited for the breeze to stop.

“What's the matter, Nawabdin?”

Saddest to me were the characters who have simply given up, such as in the story where Murad takes his new fiancé to visit his father in his huge, dilapidated house in Lahore:

The house had been built in the twenties, with many dark passages, musty fraying carpets, enormous ugly sofas and armchairs poked here and there, arranged quite irrationally, as if they had of their own volition waddled in from a furniture graveyard and huffed down and settled in for a long wait . . . It's a little dying world, she reflected, this household, these servants, the old man at the center.

Although I wouldn't go so far as some of the fulsome praise splashed across the back cover, I do think these stories are well-written and worth the time spent reading them. I agree with Tessa Hadley whose London Review of Books review is quoted: “Mueenuddin's achievement . . . is to hold open two perspectives at once: on the one hand, the long history that produces the individual profile and the individual plight; on the other, the sensation of the present, experienced on the skin and on the emotions.”

Some ten or twenty years after the Society of the Dilettanti, whom I read about in the London Review of Books, began pushing the English cultural scene to look beyond the usual Grand Tour through Italy to the wonders of Greece. Members traveled to Greece and produced drawings and books about Greek sculpture and architecture which influenced English taste for architecture and interior decoration that can still be seen in London's National Gallery, the British Museum and the interior of the Spencer House in London, to name just a few.

While touring Italy may have become old hat in England, in Germany Goethe has seen almost none of the Italian treasures that make up the core of his aesthetic. Already famous as the author of The Sorrows of Young Werther and numerous plays, he had been invited to join the government. of Weimar and had served there in several important capacities for eleven years when he suddenly in 1786 takes a leave of absence and sets off for Italy to see with his own eyes the landscapes and art that he loves. He says, “. . . in Rome the history of art and the history of mankind confront us simultaneously.” At the same time, he wants to make a break with a life that, while it rescued and protected him from the overwhelming and hysterical fame from Werther and the innate artistic limitations of the spontaneity of emotions trumpeted by the Sturm und Drang movement, has itself become a limitation. Having outgrown his friends and life in Weimar and burdened with unfinished works such as Faust, Egmont and Iphigenie, Goethe travels to Italy to find solitude and inspiration.

. . . I am a voluntary exile, a wanderer by design, unwise with a purpose, everywhere a stranger and everywhere at home, letting my life run its course where it will, rather than trying to guide it, since, in any case, I don't know where it will lead me.

Goethe wants to know everything and understand first-hand the principles underlying art and nature. Already interested in geology, he describes the minerals and stones he finds on his travels and how the underlying geology affects the lands through which he travels. Like my other solitary walker, Goethe adds botany to his list of interests, studying plants to discover what they might have in common, the ur-plant as it were. This is the time of the great amateur naturalists—the term “scientist” would not be created until some 50 years later.

This book is primarily a collection of his letters to his friends in Weimar, edited later and supplemented with some reflections. His method of description is interesting in that he avoids metaphor. He provides detailed sensory descriptions but rarely describes much of an emotional response, even when he is caught in an unexpected eruption while standing at the mouth of Vesuvius. In addition to descriptions of landscapes and artworks, many of his letters describe what he is learning and what he is working on, as though he still needs to justify his desertion.

I have reached an age when, if I still want to produce something, I must not lose any time. As you can imagine, I have hundreds of new ideas in my head, but the main thing is making, not thinking . . . Therefore, do not grudge me my time here, which for me is so strange and exciting, but give your loving approval to my stay in Rome.

He often describes his tricks for avoiding the demands of society, such as maintaining his incognito as long as possible. However, through the one person he knows in Rome, the painter Tischbein, he mingles with many artists and is invited to view private art collections. He meets Sir William and Emma Hamilton and becomes friends with Angelica Kauffman, who he says would prefer to paint what she pleases but is persuaded by her husband to accept the many lucrative commissions offered, even though the couple have plenty of money. “What's the use of talking about misery and misfortune when people who have enough of everything do not know how to use it or enjoy it?” However, he generously goes on to say, “One must look for what she does, not what she fails to do. How many artists would stand the test if they were judged only by their failings?” Throughout these pages he mentions often how hard she works and how much she accomplishes.

Goethe supplements his growing understanding of and appreciation for art with lessons in drawing and sculpture, traveling with his artist friends to nearby locations of interest such as Pompeii, Frascati, and the Palantine Marshes, and through their comments learning about perspective and color. He studies the Sistine Chapel assiduously, and sets out to learn anatomy for himself.

I enjoyed comparing his descriptions of Italy's relics, art, and music to my own more recent memories. I can also relate to his struggles as a writer. He says, “I am always hoping to do more than I actually manage to do.” Rejuvenated by his travels, Goethe did come home to complete such great works as Faust, the Wilhelm Meister books, Tasso. He also continued working on his scientific theories about biology, anatomy, and color.

Nothing, above all, is comparable to the new life that a reflective person experiences when he observes a new country. Though I am still always myself, I believe I have been changed to the very marrow of my bones.

Ordered by my doctor to take a day off and do nothing—best medical advice I've ever received!—I plunged into this book, the first of a series of four books about the Cazalet family. Like Upstairs, Downstairs, and apparently also televised by NPR though I missed it, the Cazalet Chronicle follows the members of a large family and their servants in and around the Home Place where William and Kitty collect their grown sons and their families during the summer holidays.

Patriarch William, known as the Brig to make up for his being too old to serve in the Great War, has handed over more and more of his timber business, importing specialty woods, to sons Edward and Hugh, both wounded in the war, Edward by gas and Hugh losing a hand. The third son, Rupert, was too young to serve. He is a painter who rarely has time to paint, busy teaching art and supporting his young wife and children. This book opens in the summer of 1937 as Europe rolls towards another war.

With each scene, some lasting only a page, some several pages, we change places, moving into the world of another character like a game of musical chairs. Howard uses a close third person point of view, letting us share the character's innermost thoughts and concerns. With subtle touches she makes each come alive, helping us keep straight who the different people are. A few times I had recourse to the character list and family tree in the front of the book, especially with the many children who take a little longer to come into their own, but mostly I could keep them all apart.

Howard has an especially deft hand with the children, managing to draw them without sentimental or hackneyed images; she reminds me of much I'd forgotten about being young. For instance, while confined to her bed with chicken pox young Clary decides to write seven stories, one for each of the deadly sins. She has no trouble finding examples of the first six within herself, but is stymied by lust. Not having any idea what it even means, she consults her cousin Polly who suggests that is might be like “‘a tiger lusting after its prey.'” Another cousin decides to run away from home and prepares by making out long lists of equipment he will need to live in the woods. Until I read that, I'd forgotten about the summer I decided to run away and live in a shallow cave I'd discovered near Lake Roland.

This is not a costume drama but a psychological one. So completely is each person realised that I found myself absorbed by even the most commonplace worries: a boy afraid of going off to school, a wife fearing that her husband is unfaithful, a teenaged girl revealing her first crush, an elderly governess counting over her meager resources. Trivial as they may seem compared to the threat of war, such worries are real enough to those suffering them, and it is a testament to the quality of the writing that they are to me as well. One amazing dinner scene late in the book gives us the family sitting around the table conversing but each one keeping silent about what is really on his or her mind, what worry, what fear. By that time we know them well enough to know what lies behind each small gesture.

I can't wait to read the next three books.