fiction

Mouths Don’t Speak, by Katia D. Ulysse

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mouths

A member of my book club heard Ulysse speak and was fascinated by her descriptions of Haiti and the experience of living in a new country, far from family. My friend recommended this book—Ulysse’s first novel; her previous book Drifting is a collection of short stories—to our group, and we happily agreed. We’d previously read novels set in Haiti by Edwidge Danticat and Madison Smartt Bell, and were eager to read another, especially a book by someone from Haiti.

The story opens days after the devastating Haitian earthquake that occurred on Tuesday, 21 January 2010. Now living in Baltimore with her husband and three-year-old daughter, Jacqueline is desperate to contact her parents who still live in Haiti. “She had not changed her clothes since she learned about the earthquake three days prior. She had not eaten, and she had forgotten to sleep or bathe.” All this time she has been watching the repetitive tv coverage and compulsively dialing and redialing her parents’ phone number. She hasn’t bothered to go to work (she teaches at a public school).

I found this unrealistic. Yes, I remember after the World Trade Center attacks how we couldn’t stop watching the coverage, even though there was nothing new. Some of us tried to contact family or friends. I also sat out the first days of the tsunami and Fukishima disaster with a woman from Japan. So I’m not unfamiliar with the reaction to a catastrophe. Still, Jacqueline’s stupor seemed extreme to me, especially when there’s a three-year-old in the home.

Jacqueline continues in this vein for a month before finally going outside–not bathing though; she just “put her coat on top of the clothes she’d worn for days.” And the school holds her job for her, not pressuring her to return as month follows month. Really? I taught in the Baltimore Public Schools for a few years and can’t imagine such leeway granted to a teacher. A month later, when she is almost ready to give them up for dead, her mother Annette suddenly contacts her; she and Paul, Jacqueline’s father, have been in Florida all this time, not bothering to let their daughter know that they are alive.

While some aspects of the story are hard to believe, the essential story question is not just timely, but important. How can Jacqueline forge a relationship with the parents who, fixated on their own pleasures, essentially abandoned her? Forced to practice the despised piano until her fingers bled in order to impress her parents’ friends at parties and then sent to boarding school in the U.S. when only ten, Jacqueline has had almost no contact with her parents in the intervening years. Suddenly her mother will not leave her alone, needing Jacqueline’s help now that Paul has been permanently disabled because of the earthquake.

A good story question, yet the story itself seems insubstantial. It’s narrated quickly, skipping over much that could have been explored, leaving it feeling superficial. Characters make abrupt changes for no reason. There are a number of subplots alluded to but not really explored: Jacqueline’s husband has PTSD; she’s stopped attending church after—for some never-explained reason—throwing a hymnal at the new pastor; Jacqueline instantaneously becomes BFFs with a white woman who teaches Haitian dialect. Disturbing and sometimes tragic incidents are inserted, apparently to goose up the plot rather than growing organically out of the characters and their interaction.

The underdeveloped characters are a large part of the problem. Instead of multi-faceted individuals, the characters are two-dimensional, each sounding their one note over and over. One member of my book club observed that they are all broken people, thrust together. And broken people do obsess over and over about their point of fracture, bending your ear with the same story over and over. No matter how accurate psychologically, though, it does not make for interesting reading or a convincing plot.

I so wanted this story to be good. How many children today are suffering the effects of growing up with distant, distracted, or self-absorbed parents? The bones of a great story are here. Some of the descriptions are vivid, though there’s actually very little about Haiti itself. Jacqueline’s parents are super-rich, Annette in particular loathing the worthless poor. I did appreciate that Ulysse stepped outside the stereotypes to write about the rich in Haiti and how the earthquake might have affected them, yet I had hoped for more about Haiti and its people.

Writing a novel is hard. It’s different from writing short stories. I wish the author had taken more time with this book, so she could have made it the great novel it promises to be. Dave King wrote an excellent blog post on WriterUnboxed.com about “The Practice Novel”. He says:

The problem is that novels are huge. They involve moving parts you may not even be aware of and require skills with language and tension building and insight into characters that take years to develop. You don’t just have to master these skills, you also have to develop a feel for how they all work together.

So my sympathies are with Ulysse. She’s got the emotions and the plot structure. She’s got good descriptions, strong and varied sentences, and a genuine understanding of human nature. More work with developing characters would go a long way, as would less narration and more dramatic scenes; as readers, we prefer to learn about characters from what they do rather than from what they say about themselves. Maybe this novel feels a bit rushed because she was pressured to publish it quickly. I’d like to read her short stories now, and will look to see what happens with her next novel.

What novel have you read about the immigrant experience? What did you think of it?

The Hunting Party, by Lisa Foley

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For their annual New Year’s reunion, nine friends travel to a remote lodge in the Scottish Highlands. It becomes even more remote when cut off by a massive blizzard on New Year’s Day, just as Heather and Doug—the two staff who live at the lodge—discover the body of the missing guest.

The bruises on the neck indicate murder, which means the murderer must be one of the people at the lodge, though there is a serial killer on the loose and the possibility of local poachers. The lodge sits on a loch far from the nearest town, with only three staff: Heather the manager, Doug the gamekeeper, and a third staff person who lives in the now-inaccessible town. For this weekend, the exclusive lodge has only two other visitors: an Icelandic couple who keep their distance from the rowdy group of friends.

In their thirties, the nine of them are starting to pull apart, mostly because of the changes that come with aging. The tensions between them become obvious on the train from London. Katie and Miranda have been friends since childhood, Miranda the queen bee who enlivens any gathering and Katie the plain friend. Seven others congregated around them at Oxford: Julian, now married to Miranda; two couples—Giles and Samira with their new baby, Nick and Bo—and Mark who always had a crush on Miranda. The ninth is Emma, Mark’s girlfriend of three years. She’s the one who organised this plush weekend.

The settings—the loch, the trails up the mountain, the glass lodge, individual cabins, the relentless snow—are beautifully and vividly described. Foley keeps up the suspense, not only about who the murderer is but who has been murdered. The suspense is also fed by the gradually emerging backgrounds of the characters. They have secrets, as do we all but some of theirs are pretty ugly. Old resentments, betrayal, and shifting alliances cloud the air.

The narrator changes with each chapter, giving us different insights into all the characters. There are flashbacks filling in the characters’ backgrounds and illuminating the difference between the accepted story about an incident and an actual memory from someone who was there.

I generally dislike multiple protagonists. I’m easily confused and they can blur together if the voices are not distinctive. Plus moving around keeps me from bonding with any one character, though that may not be a bad thing in a locked-room story like this, where anyone could be an unreliable narrator. I can also get confused when, as here, chapters bounce back and force between several time periods, in this case the several days around New Year’s.

I wasn’t confused here, though. Each chapter immediately clarifies who is speaking and what day it is. Also, I listened to the audio version which has a different actor for each point-of-view character, so it was more like listening to a play. Their voices did the necessary differentiation; I don’t know how well it would have worked if I’d read the book.

It’s been promoted as a classic locked-room mystery, which it is. I found the puzzle interesting; the characters less so. If you saw gamekeeper and thought D.H. Lawrence, you wouldn’t be far wrong. If you saw queen bee with plain friend and thought of stereotypes, you’d be on target, not just for those two but for everyone.

Beyond that, I simply could not work up sympathy for any of them, especially the nine friends trying to clutch at their youth, their golden days at Oxford. Drinking too much, taking pills, playing childish or teenage games, making risky impulsive decisions: maybe I’m just not the right audience for such characters. On top of that, some of the more extreme antics—no spoilers—seemed implausible to me. The person would surely have died or fallen into a coma.

Still, I enjoyed the twists and turns of the story. Some I saw coming; others took me by surprise. And I loved the descriptions of the loch and surrounding forests.

Do you like a good locked-room mystery? What’s one you can recommend?

Anything is Possible, by Elizabeth Strout

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A book by Strout is a balm just now, when we are so traumatised by grief and fear and anger. Yes, she takes us into the terrible crimes human beings, even those in quiet Midwestern towns, visit upon one another, yet she also shows us the complicated people that we are. Without dwelling on the ugliness in the almost pornographic way of many modern novels, Strout evokes in us the emotions of these characters, their trials, their loneliness, and sometimes their quiet redemption.

These nine linked stories build on 2016’s My Name Is Lucy Barton, setting them mostly in Lucy’s hometown of Amgash, Illinois and populating them with people who know or knew Lucy. Lucy herself does appear in one story, “Sisters”, when she takes a break from a book tour to visit her brother, still living—if you can call it that—in their childhood home.

Strout’s graceful transitions between the stories take a peripheral character from the previous story as protagonist of the next. Whether they grew up in poverty or not, prospered or not, are loved or not, all are damaged; what saves them is what a character in the previous book calls an “imperfect love”.

For example, in “Windmills”, Patty Nicely is a high school counselor, widowed and overweight, who had been one of the Pretty Nicely Girls. Hurt by cruel remarks from a students, who happens to be the daughter of Lucy Barton’s sister, and from her own mother, who now suffers from dementia, Patty struggles not to reply in kind. She turns to her best friend, but Angelina only wants to talk about her own marital problems. Managing these relationships calls for Patty to find a deeper well of understanding in her soul.

One comfort to her is seeing Charlie Maccauley around town. An older man, married, he interests her, despite Angelina’s revelation that he’s a Vietnam vet suffering from PTSD. This exchange between the two when they run into each other outside the post office captures Strout’s masterful use of dialogue and character description.

Eventually Charlie said, “You doing okay these days, Patty?”

She said, “I am, I am fine,” and turned to look at him. His eyes seemed to go back forever, they were that deep.

After a few moments Charlie said, “You’re a Midwestern girl, so you say things are fine. But they may not always be fine.”

She said nothing, watching him. She saw how right above his Adam’s apple he had forgotten to shave; a few white whiskers were there.

“You sure don’t have to tell me what’s not fine,” he said, looking straight ahead now, “and I’m sure not going to ask. I’m just here to say that sometimes”– and he turned his eyes back to hers, his eyes were pale blue, she noticed – “That sometimes things aren’t so fine, no siree bob. They aren’t always fine. ”

I think it is that precision of tone, the words, the details, that keep these stories from being sentimental. There’s no mawkish sappiness in Strout’s astringent prose. She gives us characters who mean well but are too busy or shy or reserved to listen to someone else or to help them. She shows us how the dark places inside them can make them do horrible things. She surprises us with their strength and compassion and with what summons these qualities.

But no matter what, she always treats them with respect and with understanding. Isn’t this in the end what we would like from each other? Isn’t this a large part of the healing we’re all seeking just now?

People seem to either love or hate Strout’s books. What’s your reaction?

The Famous Five, by Enid Blyton

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Enid

Just what the doctor ordered: three adventure stories of children in rural England. The five are siblings Julian, Dick and Anne along with their cousin George (aka Georgina) and her dog Timmy. They actually think they are just going to explore or hike or perhaps camp out, armed with torches, lashings of sandwiches, and ginger beer, but inevitably stumble upon a mystery to be solved.

Five Go to Mystery Moor, the first story in this fifth FF collection, has Anne and George, and Timmy too, spending a week at Captain Johnson’s riding school while the boys are away at a school camp. Anne loves the horses, but George is bored and annoyed that there is another tomboy there. Henry (aka Henrietta) doesn’t have curly hair like George, so seems even more like a boy. Then the news comes that George’s father is ill, so they have to stay longer and the boys are to join them.

The young people are fascinated by nearby Mystery Moor, even more so when they learn from Old Ben the blacksmith how the name originated. Exploring the moor, they come across the group of travellers who had been camped near the riding school and are warned off by the threatening men. Weird lights, blinding mists, and long-buried secrets draw the five and Henry into dangerous encounters.

The other two stories take place at George’s home, a cottage beside the sea. Julian, Dick and Anne usually go to Kirrin Bay for the summer holidays to stay with George, Aunt Fanny and Uncle Quentin.

In Five Have Plenty of Fun, George’s father has been drawn into a top-secret government project. A highly respected scientist, his absent-mindedness is just mild enough to fuel humorous episodes without seeming stereotypical. The daughter of one of his colleagues is foisted upon the other children who have to adjust to the much younger American and her little dog. Mysterious lights at night lead to a boat trip to Kirrin Island in the bay where surprises and danger await.

The final story Five on a Secret Trail has the children camping out when they stumble across a ruined cottage and an old archeological dig where a very strange boy is continuing to excavate. Wailing noises and strange lights in the night set them investigating.

This collection of three middle-grade novels by beloved author Enid Blyton provide a little respite from today’s grim news. No surprise then that the first Famous Five book was published in 1942 with more coming during the war years and the lean time afterwards. These three were first published in 1954, 1955, and 1956.

Blyton is less well-known in the U.S., which is a shame because these are delightful stories that bring mid-20th century rural England to life. The children provide a range of personalities for young readers to try on. Julian is the oldest and most responsible, while Dick is much like my younger brothers: always ready for a game or a new adventure. Unlike George, with her vehement determination to be as capable as any boy, Anne loves horses, setting things to rights, and keeping everyone on an even keel. The main thing, though, is that they are realistically presented, acting and speaking like children we know.

I wondered if there were a real Kirrin Island, since the riding school’s Milling Green is a real place in Gloucestershire. The answer is no. Two candidates for its inspiration are Corfe Castle on the Isle of Purbeck, Dorset, where Blyton spent a lot of time, and Brownsea Island, in Poole Harbour, Dorset, visible from where Blyton played golf at Godlingston Heath. A National Trust property, Brownsea is better known as the home of the Boy Scouts.

If you know some young readers or yourself want a break, dip into some Famous Five stories.

What middle-grade (aimed at ages 8-12) stories do you like?

Daughter of the Daughter of a Queen, by Sarah Bird

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What an absorbing read! Bird takes the bare bones of a forgotten slave, Cathy Williams, who posed as a man to join Sheridan’s army near the end of the U.S. Civil War and was the only woman to serve with the Buffalo Soldiers. Then she fleshes those bones out in this captivating novel and clothes them, not just with uniforms but with fully imagined bindings.

When Sheridan on his quest to starve out the Confederate army raids the already-depleted Missouri tobacco farm, he finds little left to take: a scrawny chicken, some sweet potatoes, and a slave to help his cook. He thinks the slave he’s confiscated is a boy because of his britches, and Cathy quickly discovers that she needs to keep up the disguise if she’s to survive. Glad to be free of her cruel mistress but miserable at being torn from her mother and little sister, she calls herself William Cathay.

As a writer, I was intrigued by the choices the author had to make. What kind of woman could not only survive, but become an integral part of an army of men? Bird’s answer: a woman whose mother never let her child forget that she was the daughter of the daughter of an African queen, a mighty warrior who may have been captured and sold into slavery but never lost her pride and spirit.

How would the author handle the bathroom issues, often ignored in historical fiction, but so important here to Cathy’s disguise? Bird comes up with creative, believable solutions, not just for bathing and peeing, but also for Cathy’s “monthlies”.

How much historical context of the Civil War and the Buffalo Soldiers campaign against the Indians would she include? Bird makes the smart choice to tell the story as a memoir, in Cathy’s distinctive and engaging voice. In keeping with that choice, she concentrates on the vivid details of daily life—the size of cooking pots, tea with blackstrap molasses and condensed milk, training new recruits with hay and straw, the things that Cathy would have noticed—and leaves out the big events that Cathy wouldn’t have been aware of.

What about real historical figures? Too little is known about the real Cathy to guide how she is portrayed. I’m no expert on Sheridan and Custer, the only other real figures besides a glimpse of Lee at Appomattox, but the way they are shown here is consistent with their actions.

If I have one quibble with this novel, it is in the characterization. Cathy herself is brilliantly brought to life, and two other characters, Sheridan and the cook Solomon, are complicated men who evolve during the story. However, the other significant characters are either all good or all bad. The remaining black soldiers have no moral sense beyond immediate gratification and are easily led. The Indians, whom the Buffalo Soldiers are sent to quell, are an undifferentiated vicious and terrifying horde, though to be fair that is probably all Private Cathay would have known of them.

Of course there is a love story—it’s rare for female characters to be allowed any other plot—but luckily it is but one strand in the many stories of friendship and courage and leadership.

If you’re looking for a tale of a strong woman succeeding against terrible odds, if you want to be immersed in a time other than our own suddenly grim one, check out this novel.

What issues have you encountered with historical novels? What historical novels have you enjoyed?

Jordan County, by Shelby Foote

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It was the author’s name that caught my eye. Shelby Foote is of course the author of The Civil War. I didn’t know he wrote fiction, but this is only one of several novels. Well, it is subtitled A Novel. In reality, it is that always fascinating hybrid: a novel in stories.

Here it is in a novella and six other stories, all set in the fictional town of Bristol in Jordan County, Mississippi. They are the opposite of a traditional historical narrative because they start in 1950 and go backwards in time to 1797, lending a curious perspective, an unfolding of causes, each absorbed in its present moment, but leading up to the time when Foote was writing.

The first story is begins with Pauly arriving in Bristol on the train. A 25-year-old veteran, presumably of the Korean War, he walks through the town, perplexed by the new names on stores, the traffic lights, the new parking meters. A distracted man approaches.

“They changed it,” he said to the man. “They changed it on me while my back was turned.”

“How’s that?” The worried look did not leave the man’s face.

“The town. They changed it. It’s all new.”

These are stories about change, adjusting to it, creating it, fighting it. Some characters are caught in the shredded remnants of the past while others launch themselves into the future, all while we move through the Jazz Age, across the turn of the century, into Reconstruction, the war itself, the beginnings of the town, all the way to the clearing of the Choctaws.

Almost nowhere is more haunted by dreams of the past than Mississippi, home of William Faulkner who famously said “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

In giving the life of Hector Sturgis, the novella tells of several generations of the Wingate-Sturgis family, centered in the mansion built by his grand-grandfather in 1835. On the first page we’re told that the mansion has been torn down after the death of Hector’s mother, as specified by her will, and turned into a public park.

Introduced almost as an omen of what is to come, the county is in the grip of the 1878 yellow fever epidemic when Hector is born. The description is eerily familiar: railroads and steamboats shut down, people confined to their homes.

Growing up, Hector inhabits a liminal space. Dressed by his doting mother as Little Lord Fauntleroy, he has no friends. The boys in town are briefly in awe of him but quickly turn to jeering at him. His domineering grandmother wins the power struggle over him leaving his mother seething with resentment. Spoiled, untrained in any practical skill, he is poorly equipped to take his place as a man. Yet he does have one remarkable skill.

As the story weaves and turns it began to remind me of Faulkner’s Wild Palms, that fever dream of the South, of unexpected love, of omens and tragedy and hauntings. Still, just as in the larger novel, we can see the unspooling of whims, decisions, and actions whose long tentacles entangle Hector and his family and threaten to drown them.

There’s brilliant choreography, within each story and in the novel as a whole. Foote releases information, ties things together with the most gossamer allusion, gives us the taste and feel of life in the past. These days I’m a vessel brimming with sadness for our world; Foote helps me see how we got here.

Have you read a novel in stories? How did the form work for you?

Wild Chamber, by Christopher Fowler

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What a comfort reading is during this dark time! There is much to be afraid of and loved ones to be afraid for, but it’s important to take a break sometimes, be somewhere else for a while.

I’ve been reading Fowler’s Bryant and May detective series in order. The two head up the Peculiar Crimes Unit, a division of the London police formed during WWII to handle cases that could cause public unrest. Persisting into the present, it operates like no police department you’ve ever encountered and is constantly under threat of closure by traditional-minded administrators.

Arthur Bryant has his own methods which involve consulting museum curators, white witches, and his own offbeat but strangely useful collection of reference books. He’s a bit of a trickster, with a sly sense of humor. Having more depth than the typical English eccentric, I’ve come to delight in the odd turns his thinking takes, even odder as he ages and others begin to suspect the beginnings of dementia.

John May’s reputation as a ladies’ man has taken a bit of a beating as he ages. With a more logical approach to solving crimes, he tries to protect his friend from his wilder flights and is the only one who stands up to him.

The other members of the PCU are, well, characters in the sense of being unique, believable, yet a little quirky. For instance, Janice Longbright is enamored of the style of 50’s screen actresses—makeup, heels, hair, clothes, the whole shebang—but not terribly practically for chasing suspects down dark alleys.

In this outing, Bryant and May are investigating the murder of a woman in one of London’s parks and gardens, originally called (at least once) its “wild chambers”. This garden is in an exclusive crescent, so it’s kept locked with only residents having access. How could a killer have gotten in? Where is her missing husband? And what does her murder have to do with one of Bryant and May’s cases a year earlier?

Since I’m unable to go to England this spring as planned, I especially relished the way the investigation led through many of London’s parks and gardens, calling up sweet memories for me.

In fact, London is the real protagonist of this series. The solution to the crimes almost always hinges on Bryant’s arcane knowledge of London’s past, whether it’s the history of Bedlam, the routes of lost underground rivers, or forgotten details about St. Pancras Old Church and King’s Cross.

Interestingly, Bryant and May is also the name of London-based company that ran match factories in the 19th century before being absorbed by other companies.

These two detectives would fit perfectly into a Golden Age mystery, though their stories are a bit darker than those standards. The stories don’t really fit into the various subcategories of mystery. Bryant and May aren’t amateurs, but the stories aren’t police procedurals—unless you’re willing to accept a perfectly wacky procedure. They aren’t cosies exactly, but neither are they grim crime novels. What they are is delicious. Funny, infectious, knowledgeable about human nature and London’s long history: the perfect vacation.

What are you reading? Does it give you rest, comfort or courage?

The Water Dancer, by Ta-Nehisi Coates

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This first novel from Coates, known for his nonfiction such as Between the World and Me, is the story of Hiram Walker, a young slave in Virginia whose been assigned to be the personal servant for his half-brother: the white, legitimate son of the plantation owner. Hiram’s mother was sold when he was nine, and curiously he has no memory of her. This is odd because otherwise he has perfect recall, a photographic memory.

Then one day when he is driving his feckless half-brother home, he has a vision of his mother dancing on the bridge they are approaching, and something extraordinary happens. He finds he has another, unsuspected power, one which he hopes to use to escape to the north.

Among the many wonderful layers in this story is Hiram’s ambivalent feelings towards his father. As a child he looked up to him as to a powerful god, but as he grows and begins to see the truth about the man’s failings, Hiram’s feelings become more complicated. He can’t completely lose that earlier desire to win his father’s approval. The portrait of the owner is equally nuanced, as he vacillates between treating Hiram as a son and as property. Because it’s so unusual an approach and overlaid with cultural roles, this is a great way to explore father-son relationships.

Another layer is Hiram’s new, magical power, which is called conduction. This becomes more important as the story goes on and he learns how to better use it. Supernatural powers and happenings were a significant part of slave culture, so its inclusion in this slave narrative makes sense. However, for me, this magical realism aspect dissipates some of the outrage at the mental and physical suffering of the enslaved people. Also, it seems to function as a deus ex machina in resolving problems.

To his credit, Coates does not make it easy for Hiram. For Hiram, using his powers is not like waving a magic wand, but instead is an exhausting and painful experience. It reminded me of my recurrent flying dreams as a child which were not lovely floating rides, but entailed my having to labor at a difficult breast stroke if I was to get to the person in need, a strenuous effort that always left me drained in the morning.

The writing, as you would expect from Coates, is gorgeous. His scenes draw me in, full of sensory details and poetic images that make places and stories come alive. I did not get a very deep sense of the characters, but this makes sense since we are seeing them through Hiram’s eyes. He is too young and inexperienced to be deeply perceptive about people—in fact his misunderstandings drive some of the plot. Also, this reflects the reality of slave life: People are constantly being torn away from you, sold south, or lost, so it’s better not to get too attached.

I loved the first part of the book, where even the narrative portions fascinated me, and Coates’s use of unusual terminology—the Tasked instead of slaves, the Low instead of poor whites, etc.—was delightful. However, after that, the story seemed to bog down, and I had to force myself to keep reading.

I thought about this problem for a long time, and I think it comes down to this: Once Hiram achieves his initial goal, the new goal motivating him is not strong enough to drive the story. The stakes do not seem high enough and not personal enough to make that goal matter. It is a worthy goal and certainly should matter a lot, but somehow it just isn’t convincing, at least for this reader.

Still, this coming-of-age story of a man’s journey to freedom is one of the best books I’ve read recently. I loved the unusual and nuanced way the story embodies the themes of family and memory. One of the episodes that most stands out to me is the brief story of a former slave Hiram meets who is trying to rescue the remainder of his family. Finally, like Toni Morrison’s Beloved, this novel vividly demonstrates the curious self-blindness, the dissociation that slave owners and supporters of slavery inculcated in themselves.

Have you ever shied away from a novel because it seemed as though its subject matter would be difficult or distressing? Did you ever, as I did with this book, go on to read it and be glad you did?

Beloved, by Toni Morrison

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Reading again this powerful book, I was deeply moved. It opens with Sethe and her 18-year-old daughter Denver in a house haunted by a spiteful spirit. After sexual assault and a brutal beating that left her back hideously scarred, a pregnant Sethe had escaped from slavery, making her way to Ohio outside Cincinnati where her mother-in-law lived. Denver was born just before Sethe arrived at Baby Suggs’s home, where she’d previously sent her other three children, two boys and a barely crawling girl.

It is that girl, Beloved, who haunts the house, shaking furniture from the walls, overturning the jam cupboard, hurting the dog. Only 21 days after Sethe arrived, the slave catcher showed up with her master and the sheriff. Rather than let them be taken into slavery, Sethe decides to kill her children and herself, but only succeeds in killing Beloved before she is stopped. A young mother myself when I first read the book, I was baffled by this beginning, but grew to understand it better as I read on.

Then Paul D., another slave from Sweet Home, shows up at Sethe’s house and drives out the ghost, only to—apparently—have it return in a different form.

I often forget aspects of books I’ve read (which comes in handy when I’m rereading mysteries), but not with this one. Although it had been quite a few years, having read it before left me free to notice and appreciate other aspects of the book.

For one thing, the way Morrison releases information is a master class in itself. In some instances, information only comes out later because the character doesn’t remember it or has worked hard to suppress it. Memory is a prominent theme in the book, its influence and—even when stifled—its inexorable return. In other places, information is hidden because the characters don’t know it yet or is mentioned but we don’t understand its meaning until later.

I was also interested in how the author handles the flow of time, having just read the fluid narrative of Celestial Bodies. Time here too is fungible, with the past intruding on the present, and not just in carefully transitioned flashbacks, but rather with the immediacy of thought., flitting through layers of memory. Unlike Alharthi’s novel, though, it does not flash forward into the future; that remains as mysterious as it is for all of us.

The first time I read Beloved I was too shocked at the vivid depiction of conditions under slavery and its legacy to pay much attention to much else. Not that I was naive about what humans were capable of. I’d followed the Eichmann trial, although I was barely into double digits then, and around the same time stumbled into a book called 100 Years of Lynchings that consisted of reprints of contemporaneous newspaper accounts—a chilling introduction to the horrors of Reconstruction and the Jim Crow era that followed.

But what struck me this time was the lasting effects of slavery, both physical and emotional, the way it shaped African Americans, slaves and free, even their children. The way it shaped white people too. I thought a lot about what that kind of dissociation—the lies you have to tell yourself to be able to own slaves—does to the psyche, how you must have to shut down part of yourself, do away with emotional granularity, and lock yourself in a childishly simple world. I thought about people today who seem like hypocrites to me and wondered if they too live in that simple world and don’t even recognise their hypocrisy.

I thought too, as I often have recently, about the wealth of white people, accrued from the stolen labor of blacks, Mexicans and Chinese workers. And I thought about children being taken away from their families at the border and locked in cages and how that’s even worse than taking them away and selling them to another slave owner because then at least you have the hope however faint of possibly seeing them again.

We are all haunted by the past. Not just our own, but also that of our parents and grandparents. And not just by what really happened, but also by the illusions peddled by profiteers and our own rose-colored recollections.

Have you read this extraordinary book? What impressed you most about it?

Celestial Bodies, by Jokha Alharthi

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Celestial-Bodies-Jokha-Alharthi

I’m in a few book clubs and, luckily for me, they are all interested in reading more diverse authors, hence this Man Booker-winning novel by Alharthi, who is an author and university professor from Oman. It is the story of three sisters and their extended family in a rural village outside the capital of Oman during the late twentieth century when the culture in that country was rapidly and unevenly changing.

Mayya, the oldest sister, doesn’t have much to do with the outside world, preferring to stay at home sewing. When her parents inform her that she will be married to Abdallah, son of the merchant Sulayman, they do not know she’s in love with a young man recently returned from London, whom she’s seen from afar twice. Mayya obediently marries Abdallah but names her first child, a girl, London.

Asma, the second sister, finds her joy in books and traditional religion. When her parents inform her that Khalid wants to marry her, she insists on taking a few days to decide, but eventually agrees. He is an artist whose ideal wife, as it turns out, is someone who will fall “into the orbit he had marked out, who would always be there but would also always stay just outside, yet without wanting to create her own celestial sphere, her own orbit.”

Khawla is more modern, wearing lipstick and adamantly refusing to marry anyone but her beloved Nasir who eventually rewards her devotion by marrying her but immediately decamps for Canada where he lives with his girlfriend, returning more or less annually, just long enough to get the faithful Khawla pregnant.

Marriage is not the only area where customs and mores are changing. Social classes, education for women, contact with the outside world: all of these are in motion and thus reflected in the fluidity of the book’s structure. Instead of a single plot with subplots, there are a multitude of plot threads that come to the fore and disappear, sometimes returning, sometimes not, a structure that seems to mirror what life was like for those living through such upheaval.

The brief chapters shift between a multitude of voices, making all of us in the book club rely heavily on the genealogical chart in the front of the books. Most chapters move between the sisters’ voices and those of others: their parents, London, even Zarifa, originally Sulayman’s slave, now a servant and his mistress. Almost all are women’s voices. We all preferred the book’s original title, literally translated as Ladies of the Moon.

These are interspersed with chapters of Abdallah’s first person narration. We questioned why a man should have so much real estate in a book primarily about women and be the only one addressing us directly. The only thing we could think of is that his prominence reflects the male privilege still dominating the culture. The irony is that although Abdallah’s chapters all take place on planes (he flies around the world for work), he and the other men are the characters most confined and hobbled by their roles.

Time is also extremely fluid in this book, sometimes moving decades forward and then backward into the past all in the same paragraph. Readers like me who tend to prefer a mostly linear and chronological plot may struggle to keep track of what is going on and who the characters are. Yet the effort brings a huge reward, not just in a glimpse into a—for me—unfamiliar culture, nor just the vivid and sometimes intoxicating language, but also the enlightening experience of navigating a changing world.

What diverse voices are you reading?