Parable of the Sower, by Octavia E. Butler

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This 1993 novel begins in the then-distant future of 2024, which startled me at first. Due to her mother’s drug abuse while pregnant, teenager Lauren Olamina actually feels all the sensations she witnesses in others. She calls it “sharing” and finds it a liability in her world.

She and her father, stepmother and young siblings live in a gated community ten miles outside Los Angeles. It is not just gated but fortified against the collapsing society outside, where dire poverty is rampant, services have mostly collapsed, and police and firefighters cannot be trusted. Gangs run amok, many high on a drug that makes them delight in setting fires and killing people.

Lauren comes to the conclusion that society will fail even further and their frail walls will not be able to keep out the mobs who want even the small affluence they have: vegetable gardens, acorns they’ve collected for flour, a sewing machine. She begins to train herself in how to survive, everything from recognising edible wild plants to firing a gun. But her “sharing” means that it is easy to incapacitate her, simply by hurting someone in front of her.

She creates her own belief system, which she calls Earthseed, based on the idea that the only reliable truth is that “God is Change.” Given that, then humanity can shape God. All of her preparations are needed when their fortifications are breached three years later, and she sets out to find a place to regroup and recreate a community.

At first I found this book almost impossible to read. Not because of anything wrong with the book, but because of my own despair. Such a future seems only too likely, maybe not in the next two years, but not that far off. Too many groups today are threatening civil war, and boasting that they are the ones with guns.

Then I remembered the early 1970s. Society seemed to be falling apart in the wake of assassinations, corruption, the Vietnam debacle. My partner pointed out the fragility of supply chains—something the pandemic has brought home to all of us fifty years later. Like many of those who jumped on the back-to-the-land movement at the time, he was motivated less by a desire to be closer to nature and more by wanting to be self-sufficient if—when—the social order imploded.

It didn’t. The country pulled through, damaged and deeply flawed, but holding.

This book felt so real to me, as though it were all happening right now. Just as I despaired in the beginning, I began to hope as Lauren built her community, one person at a time, one kindness at a time.

Have you read this book? What did you think of it?

Writers’ Retreats

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We just wrapped up this year’s Time to Write Writers’ Retreat at beautiful Pinewoods Camp. For four days, twenty writers left our everyday chores and overscheduled lives behind to gather in the woods. We were free to write all day or join optional group activities, such as writing to prompts or critique sessions. In the evenings we came together in front of the fire to share readings, stories and social time. A fabulous cook kept us well-fed throughout.

The retreat was restorative in many ways: jumpstarting writing and providing the opportunity to share our successes, questions, and resources with other writers. Most of all, we reveled in the peace of this magical place: the mist on the pond in the morning, the breeze in the oak and pine trees, the company of birds.

I hope you can find space to step out of your routine for a bit to restore and recenter yourself.

Do you ever go on retreat, even if it’s just a walk in the woods?

The Eye of the World, by Robert Jordan

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Most synopses of this book ignore the prologue, which started as a short story and was added here at the beginning of this first book in Jordan’s Wheel of Time fantasy series. Yet this was the part that grabbed my attention, centering as it does on a young woman in a world that seems similar to England in the late Middle Ages, though with some differences.

It’s Egwene’s first day being allowed to work as a water carrier during the annual sheep shearing in Emond’s Field, a town in the Two Rivers district. However, her ambition to be the best water carrier ever is derailed by her desire to see what the three young men—Rand, Mat and Perrin—are up to. The town has a mayor, who also owns the pub, but it is the Wisdom, an elderly woman, who holds the power. There are subtle signs that something is threatening this world.

As we move into the story proper, two strangers come to Emond’s Field: the mysterious Moiraine and her warder Lan. Gleeman Thom Merrilyn also turns up to entertain the town during the Winternight celebration with songs, stories, and juggling. When the town is attacked by Trollocs—creatures believed to only exist in legends—Moiraine leads the four young people and Thom on a quest to find out why their town was attacked and prevent future invasions.

While I love that women have the power in this world, what makes the story work is how each character is brought to life as their lives change and they are invited to become more than they ever thought they could be. Their individuality and the realistic character development kept me reading to find out what would happen to them.

A friend recommended the series, surprised that I’d never heard of it. There are fourteen books in the series, the last three of which were completed by Brandon Sanderson after Jordan’s death. Since each book is over 800 pages long, the series is a huge commitment.

The amount of detail Jordan has infused into this world is stunning. The world began when the Creator set a wheel in motion, such that the pattern of its seven ages repeat, but the intervals are so long, that people forget what’s happened before.

In addition to the theme of time being cyclical is the theme of how best to use power. The One Power which turns the wheel is divided into male and female halves, saidin and saidar. Unfortunately, history has shown that men who try to channel the One Power go mad and destroy everything, so now only women wield that power.

During creation the Creator imprisoned “Shai’tan,” the Dark One, but at various times his influence has escaped, so that his followers—Trollocs, Myrddraals and others—now fight to free him to take over the world.

Among many things I admire in this book is the language, particularly in dialogue. Jordan has found a way to suggest an older time without belaboring the reader with archaic diction. I need to study more carefully how he’s accomplished this, but one way is by occasionally using an obsolete word, such as scullion, while retaining the flow of our current speech patterns.

Another thing I admire is Jordan’s inventiveness, both with the detailed legends and with the dangers our protagonists encounter. Even more, I love the possibilities that open before them. And for once, the ending is perfect. I won’t give it away, but it is a model for how to handle the climax of a quest effectively, one way at least. And there are maps!

Will I read more? I don’t know if I have the stomach for fourteen books, but I may read a few more. There’s this one character I’d like to know more about.

Have you read The Wheel of Time series? What is your favorite fantasy novel?

Whereabouts, by Jhumpa Lahiri

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Subtitled A Novel, this book is a collection of short vignettes by an unnamed narrator, each named by where it takes place: “On the Sidewalk,” “In the Office,” etc. A picture gradually emerges of a 45-year-old woman in an unnamed Italian town whose “heart” is not really in her new teaching job, a woman who says, “Solitude: It’s become my trade.”

She seems very alone. Her colleagues keep to themselves. She has a few friends, one a married man with whom she might have once been involved with. This is just the kind of liminal relationship that interests me, but Lahiri doesn’t follow up with it, though the narrator runs into him and his wife a few times.

Some of the fragments have to do with the narrator’s parents. Her now-deceased father is remembered fondly despite his penny-pinching ways, but her relationship with her mother is strained. In one piece where Lahiri’s glorious use of language peeps out, the narrator says her mother always kept her close: “She protected me from solitude as if it were a nightmare.” Even now, her mother wants to recreate that bond, “blind to the small pleasures” of her daughter’s solitude.

Overall, though, the prose seems to me more pedestrian than I would have expected of this author whose other books have astounded me. The plot, too, is obscure: brief, seemingly unconnected incidents recounted by a person so reticent she can only share the barest details.

I suspect these limitations come from Lahiri having written the book in Italian, a recent language for her. Working myself on learning that language, I’m in awe at her accomplishment with this, her third language.

I’ve also tried writing in Italian and translating English into that language, and failed. I can use a dictionary as well as the next person, but I don’t know the connotations that have accrued to words, the cultural references evoked by certain phrases, the slang. It’s too easy to use a word innocently, not knowing what it conjures up for a native speaker.

My only recourse has been to write very simply, using basic vocabulary. I wonder if that isn’t what the author has chosen to do here. My own failures make me even more appreciative of the moments when her language sings, such as when she says of a father and daughter who run a trattoria that, coming originally from an island, they have “stored the sun in their bones.”

The lack of names—was the island Capri, Sardinia, Lampedusa?—adds to the disconnected feel of the book. The little vignettes are like leaves floating in a pond, sometimes touching briefly before slipping apart. The challenge is to make these seemingly random pieces hold the reader’s interest.

I love the concept of locating each piece so precisely—“At the Ticket Counter,” “On the Balcony”—while withholding any identifier that would anchor them in our world. Although I miss Lahiri’s beautiful language, I love the way the style she’s chosen for this novel reflects the narrator’s self-sufficiency. Other reviews mention the narrator’s loneliness, but I see her as positive about the solitude she has chosen. Yes, she has casual encounters and a few relaxed friendships, but prefers to walk the world alone. She betrays no angst and no regrets about her choice.

The fragmentary form of the book reflects what our lives are actually like. One of the greatest challenges of writing memoir is finding a narrative arc in our messy lives. In this novel, Lahiri has chosen to present a messy life without a narrative arc. It is an experiment in form and language that leaves me with the haunting portrait of a fictional woman I wish I knew more about.

Have you read any of Jhumpa Lahiri’s books?

Much Ado about Nothing

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I usually review books, not films, but I have to make an exception here. It is rare that a film is so much more than the text, and here is a great example. Adapted and directed by Kenneth Branagh, starring himself and Emma Thompson, plus an all-star cast, this is my favorite summer film. It brings Shakespeare’s play to life beyond what you could best imagine.

First off, there’s the beginning. The entire film takes place at a huge villa in Tuscany. The opening scenes—and the transcendent music—evoke the peace and beauty of rural life and the excitement of the men returning from the battlefield.

This is catnip for anyone who has ever dreamed of renting a villa in Tuscany: vineyarda, women in flowing white dresses picnicking among the olive trees with music and bread and wine. Then come the stirring hero shots of the men galloping along the road. And—balm to my practical soul—everyone bathes and dresses themselves in clean linen to meet, all to the thrilling soundtrack. Such joy!

Of course complications ensue. So does comedy, this being Shakespeare, after all. Brilliantly paced, brilliantly acted.

At no point does Shakespeare’s language seem anything other than utterly normal, thanks to the quality of the cast. I have to single out Denzel Washington whose dialogue seems even more natural, if that’s possible. What a gift, to make this language seem everyday!

Films based on books or plays often cut corners to keep the running time down to the standard limit. Often they choose one theme or story line among many to follow. This is the rare exception where the film exceeds the reading experience.

There is so much joy here, so much celebration of life! Give yourself the gift of streaming this film today. With a hey, nonny, nonny!

Is there a book or play you’ve read where the film is actually better?

Migrations, by Charlotte McConaghy

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Arriving in Greenland with only her research gear, Franny Stone is determined to study the last of the Arctic terns. She says that even though her expedition has been canceled, she intends to follow the terns on what will be their final migration to Antarctica.

The book is set in the near future when climate change has wiped out most birds, fish, and animals. The scientific community believes the Arctic terns are extinct, but Franny does find the last few. However, without fish to eat along the way, the terns might not make it to Antarctica, so she must find a way to follow along with them. She must know if any of them make it safely.

Franny talks her way onto a fishing boat with a curmudgeonly captain and quirky crew. Unable to make a living off the meager fish in the sea and hounded by people onshore who are furious that the fishermen are killing the few remaining fish, the sailors are lured by Franny’s promise of a last big haul. So they set off, using her instruments to follow the terns she banded.

But Franny is more than a loner; she is a leaver. She says:

It isn’t fair to be the kind of creature who is able to love but unable to stay.

What and who she has left and why are unclear. Where is the husband she writes to every day? What crime has she committed? Will she find her mother? The tales of her losses begin to unspool in side currents, her dark secrets roiling the story by tossing the reader back and forth in time.

Most of the people in my book club were unsettled by these time shifts and confused by the fragments of several stories that only gradually begin to cohere. The fragmentation, confusion, and dissociation reflect Franny’s state. She, too, is ready to become extinct.

The themes of loss and leaving and migrations are multi-layered, but McConaghy treads lightly. It was only when I finally wrenched myself away from the book at the end that I was able to appreciate how intimately they permeated the story. I also appreciated that, while this future is only to likely to occur and pretty soon, the book is different form other dystopian novels, not frantic or furious. It is a quiet book.

And truly a magnificent one. The writing, the world-building, the offbeat characters, the way McConaghy inspired my immediate allegiance to this damaged woman and her quest: all excellent. My favorite part was when she was on the ship—I so enjoyed the crew members, their community of oddballs and their treatment of Franny.

Because of my outsized love for this story, my disappointment at the end was also outsized. As we drew closer, I wondered how the author would wrap it up. Since I had sometimes wondered if Franny was an unreliable narrator, I was even prepared for it to have all been a dream. However, the actual end seemed to have been written for a different book altogether, so at odds was it with the rest of the book. On this point, everyone in the book club agreed.

One person noted how odd it was that we kept saying we loved the book even as we discussed what bothered us. For example, many members struggled to read it, confused by the fragmented plots and the time shifts. Several said they could only read a little at a time, though I barreled through it, as did at least one other person. Yet we did love it.

We loved the tenderness of this story. We loved the crows who brought her presents and the sailors who gruffly tried to help her. We believed in her mission, we who have seen the chestnut trees disappear, the wild dogwoods, and now the beeches. We’ve tracked the ups and downs of the crabs, oysters and rockfish in the Chesapeake, and participated in bird species counts. In our long lives we’ve known leave-takings and losses.

Read this book. Be prepared to be moved. And moved to action, even if it is only to go outside to appreciate the bright zinnias and sunflowers, to hear the whir of hummingbirds at the feeder, to see the deer moving like ghosts among the trees.

What have you lost that you can never get back? What journeys are you compelled to take?

Dear Suzanne, by Eve Rifkah

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I’ve read this slim volume several times and will probably continue to reread it. Rifkah alternates poems in the voice of artist Suzanne Valadon with prose sections by a present-day narrator, apparently Rifkah herself, that read like prose poems. Together they create a multi-faceted portrait of what it means to be an artist, a mother, wife, granddaughter, lover.

In summoning the spirit of Suzanne Valadon, Rifkah explores what it means to be a woman and an artist, unappreciated, known mostly for her work as a model for artists like Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Berthe Morisot. Rifkah imagines how Suzanne herself might have described her sacrifices for her husband André Utter and damaged son Maurice Utrillo V, both artists, Maurice being better-known than Suzanne until recently.

Grandmother and Grandson the last painting of Madeleine
age 79….her mind wrapped in superstitious wandering.
Her face turned away from Maurice
away from love shredded by madness
……….they suffer each other in ache
captured by daughter and mother
a trinity tied in paint *

This poem, which ends with Madeleine’s death, is followed by Rifkah’s description of her own mother’s death. By combining Suzanne’s voice with her own, intertwining their stories, generating resonances, Rifkah has created a stunning exploration of a multitude of family relationships.

Yet Rifkah also goes beyond this handful of lives to look at the freedom sought by an artist. Like Suzanne who did not change her name with marriage, Rifkah discards her father’s and husband’s name, “becoming me alone. We change our name to change the road we travel from birth.”

I appreciate the need to define your own life, free of society’s plan for you, having come of age during feminism’s second wave when all the old models for a woman’s life went out the window and we had to create our own.

Back then, I read biographies of women artists and writers, looking for ideas. Now I read them with appreciation for the difficulty of the task. Rifkah examines the deep urges that motivate an artist, whether of words or paint, even when you see your intensely imagined works outsold by others’ scenes that are taken home by tourists “to say they’d seen Paris.”

When my model leaves
fingers still tingle
……….brushes stay fast to my hand
like the girl in the story dancing in enchanted shoes
until feet cut off

Read this book to learn about Valadon. Read it to learn about being an artist. Read it for the pleasure of the lines and sentences.

Have you ever read a novel or biography in verse?

*Note that the dots are meant to indicate spaces.

Author Tours

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When I went to Toronto many years ago to visit my son who had moved there, he took me on a tour of the city to show me the places in Michael Ondaatje’s masterful novel In the Skin of a Lion. I had loved the novel, along with the other Can Lit books my son had recommended (Timothy Findley, Alistair MacLeod, Jane Urquhart, David Adams Richards, Margaret Laurence, etc.) at that time not available in the U.S. Somehow, seeing the actual places mentioned in Ondaatje’s book made it come alive for me in a different way.

Perhaps you have had this experience. If you read a book set in a place you know well, you have a different relationship with the story. When I read an Anne Tyler book or one by Laura Lippman, I recognise the places in and near Baltimore that they mention, and the story becomes that much more real.

A few years ago when I was in Edinburgh, I went on an Ian Rankin tour. His books are true works of literary art, and I highly recommend them. I first found one in a Toronto bookstore; they weren’t available in the U.S. and the online bookstore thing hadn’t taken hold yet. He immediately became one of my favorite authors, and I’ve enjoyed watching his immense talent increase with every book, especially those featuring detective John Rebus.

The tour was fun, taking us to places that cropped up in his books as well as to buildings where he and fellow Edinburgh authors lived. I also made an effort to look on my own for things referenced in his books, such as the miniature coffins found on Arthur’s seat and Rebus’s favorite bar.

Recently I enjoyed a tour in Quebec City that took us to places mentioned in Louise Penny’s Bury the Dead. Seeing where the incidents in the story took place, following Inspector Gamache’s footsteps, enjoying the restaurants and bistros mentioned made the story real in an entirely different way. If nothing else, I saw how short a distance it was in some cases from one place to another, making it easier to understand how Gamache could move so quickly between them.

Our tour guide Marie had some inside information: Penny herself had stayed in the house where Gamache stayed with his friend Emil in the story. Marie had seen inside and verified that it matched the description, just as we could verify the descriptions of other, more public places mentioned.

Marie speculated that Penny had eaten in these restaurants, ridden the funicular, visited the Cathedral-Basilica of Notre-Dame de Quebec. I thought: Of course she did! That’s how you research a book. All good writers do that.

When you travel, I encourage you to read novels set there and, if possible, take a tour of the places mentioned. Let me know how that changes your perception of the book.

Have you ever taken a tour of places mentioned in an author’s book? If you read a book set in a place you know well, how is the experience different?

The Sentence, by Louise Erdrich

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When Tookie is sent to federal prison for moving a dead body—it was to help a friend and Tookie didn’t know what else she was moving—a teacher sends her a dictionary. The study of words saves her sanity. Sentence, for example, is not just an independent thought or expression. It is not just a mathematical equation or logical statement. It is both a judgment and a punishment. She says that “the most important skill I’d gained in prison was how to read with murderous attention.”

When she is unexpectedly released after ten years, she goes to work at an independent bookstore in Minneapolis specialising in indigenous history, fiction, memoir and poetry, a stand-in for Erdrich’s own Birchbark Books. Native American herself, Tookie is fascinated to learn about her own culture and loves finding just the right book for a hard-to-please customer.

Less enjoyable are the wanna-bes, the White people who wish for or actually claim native American heritage, such as the domineering Flora who comes in every day bearing unwanted gifts until she unexpectedly dies, holding a book. From then on, her uneasy spirit haunts the bookstore, at first seen only by Tookie and later by the others who work there.

I would have been happy to live in this book for five times as long as it took to read it. I love Tookie’s voice as narrator: low-key, expecting the worst, appreciating what isn’t, aware of her own faults. I love her courage and her passion. She adores her now-husband Pollux despite the fact that he was the tribal policeman who arrested her, and has a testy relationship with his daughter Metta who turns up with a baby.

Then comes 2020. Up to that point, the impact of the larger society has already been felt. In addition to the wanna-bes and the issues independent bookstores face, Tookie says, “I was on the wrong side of the statistics. Native Americans are the most oversentenced people currently imprisoned,” and knows how lucky she is to have found a job after prison.

We are so engrossed in her ordinary and extraordinary life, that her reaction to the pandemic, the shutdown, George Floyd’s murder and the protests in her city mirror our own, making the unexpected familiar.

I love the easy mix of social classes in this story and the friendships that develop. I love the understated humor and the way current events are folded into the story. I love the fluid boundaries between past and present, reason and spirituality, those we hold dear and those who haunt us.

Most of all I love the books: title after title bandied about as Tookie tries to find the right book for a discerning customer or one-up a co-worker. I’m poring over the list provided for free by the publisher, checking off the ones I’ve read, highlighting the ones I want to read.

Tookie’s is a different world from the one James MacBride conjures in Deacon King Kong, but it is equally vibrant and so real I felt I knew these people. What a wonderful book!

What’s your favorite Louise Erdrich book?

Year of the Monkey, by Patti Smith

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Part memoir and part meditation, part travelogue and part dream journal: this book takes us into Smith’s world during the unsettling year 2016. Smith’s wanderings during that Chinese zodiac year certainly embody a monkey’s traits of cleverness, curiosity, and mischievousness.

The year starts for Smith with a series of concerts at San Francisco’s Fillmore Theatre, followed by a surreal visit to Santa Cruz. From there she takes off on solitary wanderings to places like New York, Arizona, Kentucky, as well as to imagined and remembered places. She talks to strangers, meeting real and imagined people. She keeps vigil at the bedside of a beloved friend in a coma and visits another near the end of his life.

But more than her physical journeys, it’s what happens when she brings her particular mindset to grapple with the small irritations of life like the flood in her apartment, the larger problems in the country careering toward a showdown between democracy and what we then thought was populism in the November election, and most of all the death of friends and lovers, as well as the sense of her own time on earth running out as she approaches her 70th birthday.

It is art that holds her steady, whether studying the Ghent altarpiece or discussing Roberto Bolano’s work or a classic film. In one of my favorite parts she visits Fernando Pessoa’s house in Lisbon, and examines his personal library. He was a fascinating poet who wrote under his own name and 75 others, which he called heteronyms, creating full lives for each alternate personality.

In my classes on story structure, I’ve begun including a section on experimental structures. I tend to prefer more linear stories when I’m reading, but Jane Alison‘s book Meander, Spiral, Explode has helped me better appreciate other patterns and also to recognise them in stories that I’ve loved.

This memoir is definitely a meander, perhaps one of the hardest structures because it still has to hold together even as it wanders in a seemingly random fashion. Smith makes the challenge even greater by moving in and out of dreams and memory. As in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, the margins are fluid. Smith moves deftly between the humorous, banal, or wrenching moments that make up her year, finds signs and portents in unexpected places, and stumbles upon strange happenings.

I listened to the audiobook narrated by the author. Her distinctive voice—the audible one—carried me even deeper into the experience than I believe her authorly voice alone would have. I mostly listened to it as I was falling asleep. Thus, with the membrane between sleep and waking so permeable, the surreal turns and dream logic seemed fitting.

I’d like to read it again and study more closely how she made it all work.

What book have you read recently that you immediately wanted to reread?