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I was quite taken by the cover of this book, a muted picture of a the corner of a shadowed room with a faintly glowing window in the darkest wall. It’s not the first time I’ve chosen a book simply because of the cover, just as I sometimes use my friend’s method of selecting wine based on whether I like the picture on the label; the uncertainty creates space for discovery.

This novel takes place in the “new” South Africa of the 1990’s where people of all races are trying to work out where they stand in the new social climate even as they struggle with resentment and reconciliation. It follows an Afrikaner woman named Marion who owns a travel agency where she has just hired Brenda, her first employee of color. Marion owns an apartment by the sea, appropriate for someone whose father has always called her his “meermin” or mermaid. Although her parents came from a “dirt-poor” background, they prospered in Cape Town, and Marion herself leads a carefully ordered and affluent life, running her business and visiting her aging father, until dreams and chaotic memories begin to disrupt her equilibrium.

I enjoyed the writing. Wicomb’s syntax is unassuming but subtly spellbinding. Many dialect words and expressions are inserted, but their meaning is clear and they are not intrusive. I found the descriptions of the interactions on the street, in the break room at the travel agency, the father’s run-down cottage, and the home of Brenda’s family powerful. However, I simply could not warm to Marion. Several times I almost abandoned the book, not so much because Marion was such a cold, solitary person, but because I could find no common point where I could engage with her.

When there is a main character I don’t like or am not interested in, there must be some compensating factor to keep me reading: a fascinating story or enthralling writing. The writing here is good, but the reason I didn’t abandon this book was the metastory, the larger issue of who holds the power in social relationships and what they do with it.

Power isn’t supposed to be a factor in a friendship, but it is. Sometimes friendships coalesce where one is the leader and the other the follower. Or friends can be experts in different fields, e.g., one knows all about music while the other is a visual artist. But the relationship doesn’t stay there. The follower matures and becomes powerful enough to challenge the leader. The artist learns more about music while the musician doesn’t look up from her score. The balance of power between two friends fluctuates, particularly in an environment such as South Africa where the power relationships between the larger societal groups are also changing.

I thought this book remarkable for taking on such an unusual and fascinating subject. For the most part, Wicomb handled it deftly. The ending was a bit of a clunker, just the last few pages—disappointing after so much lovely prose and so many nuanced insights into these characters and their relationships.

I couldn’t leave Turkey without checking into these great epics, published as Memed, My Hawk and They Burn the Thistles in English translation. They take place in the Taurus mountains, just after the first World War, when the Ottomans have been banished and all the boundaries redrawn. Mustafa Kemal has driven out the French and abolished the feudal system. However, like the carpetbaggers that swarm in after any war, a few newly rich men have started acquiring land and power, setting themselves up as aghas or lords. When the villagers could no longer be tricked out of their land, the aghas beat and tortured the holdouts or brought in brigands to burn the villagers’ homes and steal their horses.

We first meet Ince Memed, Slim Memed, as a young boy running away from home. After his father died, the local agha beat the boy and his mother and took their land, condemning them to be serfs on his land. When the agha finds Memed, he subjects him and his mother to an even greater punishment: instead of taking two-thirds of their laboriously scythed and hand-threshed wheat, the agha takes three-quarters and threatens the other villagers not to give them a single grain. Although some of their neighbors disobey the injunction, the two are left to starve until they finally surrender and give their single cow and its calf to the agha. Later, when Memed has grown, the agha takes even the youth’s fiance to be his own nephew’s bride.

Memed’s struggle against this cruel despotism leads him to the mountains to become a brigand, first joining a band that is not in the pay of an agha and then leading his own small band. Eventually he becomes a great hero to the people of all the villages, a Robin Hood who cannot be shot and who inspires some of them to fight back. Memed finds his fame a burden and, in the second novel, is plagued by a sense of futility when the agha he kills is replaced by another who is even worse. “‘Why struggle?'” he asks old Suleyman, the man who had taken him in and adopted him back when Memed had first run away. “‘It is right to struggle,'” Suleyman replies.

These novels, separately and together are great reads. In them, the elements of a novel are equally strong: the enthralling plot carried me forward like a river in spate; the complex emotions and motivations of the characters are explored in ways that are integral to the story; and the settings—the plains, the mountains, the streets of the town—are described in vivid detail: the feel of the mud sucking at your boots, the color of the thistle fields at sunset, the cold of a mountain cave in winter, the bees and butterflies and green snakes.

And behind it all the eternal theme: good versus evil, the risk and damage done to the hero who stands up, the gradual rise of an oppressed people against men whom greed has turned into tyrants. Memed compares the people to a thousand-headed dragon: “Cut off the thousand heads and a whole forest of heads emerged.”

People of Paper is not like any book I have ever seen. Clearly experimental, the text alone shows that the author wanted to play with form and meaning. I thought it would be hard to read for this reason, but in fact the story engaged my interest immediately and—for the most part—kept it as the plot unrolled. I was afraid that the gimmicks were intended to hide poor writing, but in fact the writing was quite good.

I liked the first part of the book best. It's rare to find an author who handles magical realism as well as Plascencia does, and his formal innovations only added to the fun. The story begins with an origami surgeon, a man who creates organs for transplant and then goes on to create entire people out of nothing but folded paper. All the characters were strange, yet I couldn’t help entering into their interests and cheering for them as they picked flowers and engaged in a war against Saturn. Why? Because he was looking at them.

Mid-way through, I was disappointed at finding out Saturn’s identity; the whole story suddenly seemed rather mundane and just too cute. For example, I had really liked the idea of origami surgery and didn't want it to be a simplistic metaphor. Books that leave room for my own imagination have a stronger impact on me. I also wasn’t much interested in hearing about the author’s personal issues and problems writing the book.

However, Plascencia managed to hold it together enough for me to finish the book. I liked the characters in the town best: Froggy who endured the gang initiation and became its heart, Federico who needed to sit under the shell of a mechanical tortoise in order to think, Baby Nostradamus who could hide his thoughts. I would have liked the book better if Plascencia had stuck with them instead of spelling out his metastory (and metaphors), but perhaps others will enjoy the extra layers.

Ultimately, the book is a cautionary tale about the power of stories. We can all create narratives (whether books or news articles or simply gossip), and we can also be the unwilling subjects of them. The book made me think about the power of the narrator over the subject, his/her power to intrude on other people’s privacy or inflict damage on their lives. Words can mean what we want them to, as Humpty Dumpty told Alice; all that matters is who is to be Master.

A couple of years ago, a friend of mine ran away to join the circus. She went on tour with Cirque du Soleil as part of the orchestra. Not quite the traditional big top and elephant-led parade, but it reminded me of childhood fantasies of criss-crossing the country as part of a circus. Sure, I wanted to get gussied up in pink satin and ride around the ring standing on the back of a big white horse, but that wasn’t my primary motivation. Being on the road appealed to me; in another place and time, I’d have fantasized about running off with a gypsy caravan. Most of all, I wanted to hang out with the circus people. I wanted to be one of those enlightened and cynical people behind the scenes, the ones who knew all the secrets.

These books share some of those secrets. People on my maillists have been raving about Water for Elephants for months, so I picked it up and became absorbed by this story of a Depression-era circus and the young runaway who joined it. It’s framed by the story of the same man at ninety-three, stuck in a comprehensive care retirement community, “one of the ancient dusty people, filed away like some worthless tschotchke.” The two stories feed off each other; Jacob doesn’t seem to have lost much of his orneriness and hot-headed courage over the years.

Gruen’s extensive research adds depth without calling attention to itself. Period and sensory details made me feel the bite of a toothless lion, the rocking of the train underfoot, the difficulty of moving from wheelchair to walker. Some circus characters and scenes turn out to be based on those she discovered in her reading. And I was charmed by the period photographs she included.

My only quibble was with the prologue. Some people can’t stand prologues; they skip them or refuse to read a book that has one. I don’t mind them, as long as they contribute to the story and aren’t just a—to me, lazy—way of foreshadowing or starting in media res, as we’re told to do. Here, the prologue is a chunk of the climax copied and pasted in front of Chapter One. It’s confusing because we don’t know the characters or what’s going on. It’s unnecessary because Chapter One’s opening is a fine start. And—for me—it detracts from the climax when we finally get there by adding a ho-hum, been-there dimension. It did not make me curious to read on; it simply exasperated me.

However, I was able to forget about it quickly and fell so thoroughly under the spell of the story that I read it all in one go. I kept trying to put it down so I could tackle my massive to-do list but next thing I knew, there I was reading it again. It even sent me back to Toby Tyler on which the 50’s tv show Circus Boy was based. The show starred Mickey Dolenz, later one of the Monkees, as Toby.

Although my copy of the book with its brittle brown pages doesn’t show a date, I thought it must date from the era of sugar-sweet children’s stories. Maybe, but this book surprised me with its candid look behind the tent flaps. Some of the details, such as the “lemonade” made from brook water with a few lemon slices for show, were similar to Gruen’s book (hers was a little worse: trough water with the straw filtered out). Certainly the idea was the same: circus people are like any other group of people, a mixture of kind, generous folks and cruel bullies. Even so, there are still days when running away to join the circus seems to me like a great idea.

Continuing the Turkish theme—and indeed there is a cat named Pamuk and a minor character named Orhan—my book club selected this novel about Turkey during the early 20th century. We had enjoyed a good discussion of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin a few years ago, so hoped for good things from this new novel.

The first half makes a good beach book, with its short chapters, so vibrant and humorous. In a mosaic of self-contained anecdotes, de Bernieres builds up a portrait of a small town on the southern coast of what is now Turkey, many of whose colorful characters have nicknames that reflect their professions (e.g., Iskander the Potter, Mehmet the Tinsman) or perceived characteristics (e.g., Lydia the Barren, Ali the Broken-Nosed). Muslims and Christians all consider themselves Ottomans, and there is no religious strife. In fact, they sometimes give offerings in each other’s traditions, saying they wanted to back both horses. De Bernieres is an excellent writer, and each scene is deeply imagined and brought to life with sensual detail that delights.

If there is a serious thread in the beginning, it is of misogyny, women as property or pets that must be put down when they misbehave. As the story progresses, we see this attitude applied to those of particular ethnic backgrounds, such as Armenians, and other scapegoats, such as the unpopular local activist and teacher. We see people’s foolishness and cruelty when gathered together into a group. There was much written about mob psychology after WWII, trying to make sense of the Holocaust. This town is too small for the people to be anonymous in their mob, but, like eighth-graders in the hallway, they cannot resist egging on a fight or joining in the persecution of the day’s victim. And de Bernieres reminds us of the many other holocausts that led up to and followed the Great War.

Once the war starts, the story gets serious. We spend several chapters at Gallipoli, up to now well-documented from the Australian side, but here we see it from the Turkish side, through the eyes of one of the young men of the town. The vivid writing and sensual details that made the first half of the book so delightful here bring home the horror and occasional joy of war.

The brief chapters about Mustafa Kemal that were interpolated into the first half of the book now expand into longer narratives about the progress of the war, the various political factions in the country, and the War of Independence with Greece that followed the Great War. Although well-written and engaging, this part of the book is essentially a nonfiction summary of the political and military context. I found these sections unnecessary to the story, but perhaps my opinion is skewed because I had recently read several books about Ataturk and the end of the Ottoman empire.

In fact, by the time the story returns to the town in the final pages, I found I had lost interest in the characters and their dilemmas. Even the promised climax seemed rather flat to me, and the story trailed off. But perhaps that is the point. Even for those who survive, war destroys the quality of their lives. Nothing is the same afterwards. Poppies may grow over the mass graves in Gallipoli, but the longing to return home is never satisfied.

Sometimes I wonder why we even need stories. Reading (or watching) stories can be a distraction, just another way of filling up time. I’ve stopped listening to books on tape while I walk my usual 3-5 miles a day, in order to pay better attention to what’s around me, though I still listen to them in the car.

Yet I’ll never give up my addiction to stories. For me, it is not so much the surrogate thrill of an adventure story or the satisfaction of solving a mystery story’s puzzle—though I enjoy both—as it is the sense of being taken out of my life. Occasionally it’s just a relief to escape for a while from the endless story of me, but more often I actively want to be someplace else—Turkey or Antarctica—or I want to know what it is like to be someone else—an immigrant from Jamaica or an English student gone walkabout (or boat-about). As if I were an actor able to play many roles on stage, reading gives me the chance to experience alternative lives and bring back the lessons I’ve learned.

These stories of Jean McGarry’s are not so much about home as they are about family. They bring to life childhood and the way siblings relate to each other. “The Calling” reminded me of the nicknames, teasing and insults; as well as the underlying connection. I also particularly liked the subtlety of “Mr. and Mrs. Bull” where a woman visits her aunt and uncle for the first time in ten years, and we only gradually realise the great gift she has been given.

The stories are deeply imagined and precise, using the right details to create their world. Most of them are set in or near Providence. I recently spent several weeks in New England, reconnecting with old friends, wandering through small towns and rural routes, avoiding the fancy Boston bars and pilgrim re-enactors. I was overwhelmed by the number of ponds opening beside the road, ponds that sparkled under the sun, their ruff of pine trees dark and mysterious.

New England always seemed reticent and withdrawn to me. However, on this trip, I was surprised by how friendly everyone was: the gas station attendant who regaled me with the saga of a thunderstorm earlier in the day; the shop clerk wanted to chat about the relative merits of Carver and Plymouth; another who (though half my age) wanted to know all about my plans for the night; the young waiter who stayed to chat after taking my order, convinced he had waited on me before, even as the table of laughing girls called for him to come back and hang out with them.

Many of McGarry’s stories capture that defiant New England sadness that fills towns from Pawtucket to Barre, a hopelessness that is offset—buoyed somehow—by a feisty harshness, a determination to get by. The routes I traveled revealed vegetable stands with hand-painted signs and backyard body shops where men with tattooed arms lifted fenders and swung mallets. McGarry’s stories of families and communities struggling not to dissolve made me sad, until I recognised the network of connections that underlay them, like veins under the skin, tough fibers that would not give up their hold.

I tried to read this classic mystery once before, when I was a teenager, and stopped after about fifty pages. It seemed that the story was going nowhere and—worse—seemed overly bogged down with descriptive passages. I was just coming off of The Sound and the Fury and Portrait of a Lady both of which I loved, so thought I was up to the challenge of heavy-duty prose. I just couldn't get interested in the story.

However, I'm glad I picked it up again. What a great read! Pieces of the brilliantly puzzling plot are doled out at just the right time to sustain the suspense. And the suspense is not the sickening car-chase kind that makes your adrenaline sing. It is the quiet, persistent, growing suspense that develops organically from the story.

One evening in July 1859, a drawing master, Walter Hartright, was walking home to London from visiting his mother. Just after he crossed Hampstead Heath, he encountered a woman dressed all in white who was in some distress and begged him to help her reach London. As they walked along, he mentioned that he was about to take up a post in Cumberland. She told him of a happy time in her life when Mrs. Fairlie of Limmeridge House was particularly kind to her, much to his astonishment, since Limmeridge House was precisely where he was headed.

This meeting and circumstances around it raise questions in Hartright's mind, questions which multiply and take on new significance as the plot unfolds. The story is told in first person, moving from Hartright's narrative to the journal of a woman, to various depositions given by characters at the appropriate moment. These shifts in point of view are handled very well. Each is justified and explained by the story. Moreover, they are clearly labeled and the voice of each varied appropriately for the character speaking. And having the character himself or herself actually provide the information gives it an immediacy and authenticity which would be missing in a second-hand recounting.

Mystery writers would do well to study Collins' technique, not just the way he handles voice and shifting points of view, but the way his characters are presented and allowed to shift and change over time in ways that seem perfectly natural. And, of course, the means he employs to create and sustain the reader's interest.

This memoir suffers from some of the same weaknesses as Snow (see my previous post). The chapters are disjointed and ramble from subject to subject, always circling around the Istanbul of Pamuk’s youth. He has good transitions between the chapters but the book as a whole never coheres, at least for me. However, some of the chapters are outstanding, so evocative that I feel I too am there, pretending the carpet in his grandmother’s museum of an apartment is the sea, watching the ships on the Bosphorus, walking the streets in search of the old wooden mansions that are falling to pieces. And scattered throughout the book are amazing photographs that capture the mystery and routine of daily life in the city.

What most delighted me were his extended meditations on a subject that has interested me for several years, ever since I first wandered through the Forum in Rome, surrounded by the bustling city, the whine of Vespas dodging among cars, the chattering voices of workers heading off for their mid-morning espresso. What does it do to you to grow up among the ruins? To be constantly reminded that your nation once ruled the world, but does so no longer? Would you feel inadequate, a failure because you could not equal the achievements of your ancestors? Would you be proud of the past? Or would you just walk by the ruins every day and not even notice them? The answer probably differs from one person to another.

In The Enigma of Arrival V.S. Naipaul writes about a man coming to stay ” . . . in the cottage of a half-neglected estate, an estate full of reminders of its Edwardian past, with few connections with the present.” He talks about living with the idea of decay and the way things seemed ” . . . like a vestige, a memory of another kind of house and garden and street, a token of something more complete, more ideal.” In this story, the people had not moved on, preferring to remain in the past.

Christopher Woodward’s In Ruins explores how our ideas about ruins have changed over time and from one civilization to another, analysing paintings, books and buildings. An architectural historian, I believe Woodward was at one time the curator of Leighton House, one of my favorite London museums. It is so crowded with THINGS—sculptures, paintings, furniture, bits and pieces of broken marble—a marvelous jumble to be sure but it made me want to go home and clean out the basement.

Sometimes I wonder if it wouldn’t be better just to clear out all these old bits and pieces. Pamuk says that “. . . in Istanbul the remains of a glorious past civilization are everywhere visible.” Unlike the proudly displayed ruins in Rome or Greece, these ruins ” . . . inflict heartache on all who live among them.” However, he treasures that heartache and describes the peculiar melancholy—huzun—that they inspire.

As I sort through the family papers, photos and mementos that have recently been handed down to me, I struggle with deciding how much of the past to hold on to and how much to jettison. As one of my sons said, what do I want with photos of people I never met? Of course, I won’t get rid of anything. I’ll hand it off to another sibling, but I wonder if anyone in the next generation will care.

I wasn’t sure how to read this book. At first I thought it was going to be one of those books where the power of the language enchants me and carries me through the story. Then I thought that it was going to be a surreal book, like one of Kafka’s. Then I thought perhaps it was a political novel, like one of Graham Greene’s ‘entertainments’.

I never did figure it out. A little of each, perhaps. The story lurched from one incident to another, with me joining the main character in not understanding exactly what was going on. At least there was a main character! The premise is that Ka, a famous poet, gets trapped by a blizzard in a remote town in Turkey, where he’s gone to research an article about suicides among young women and to see an old flame who is now divorced.

And that’s about it. He watches the snow from his hotel room, talks with the women, and wanders around town. He meets—by appointment and by accident—and talks with a number of people, supposedly to learn about the head-scarf girls, young women who are said to have killed themselves rather than remove their head scarves, the wearing of which has been banned in the schools. However, their talks range much further, into history and dreams and religion.

The first part of the book fascinated me but the middle bogged down in confusion. I only kept reading because it was for my book club, but I’m glad I did as the end picked up and the various threads began to make a little more sense. I came to realize that the fragmented story reflected the fragmentation of these people’s lives, rudderless since the breakup of the Ottoman empire, their identity erratic and uncertain. It also reflected the fragmentation of the political body of Turkey, torn between continuing Ataturk’s westernizing reforms, Kurdish separatism and Islamic fundamentalism.

One person in my book club asked if we thought Pamuk deliberately made the book so hard to read. Did he think about the reader or write this book simply for himself? I myself believe that one must always write for oneself, but then the writer has to step back and consider his or her responsibility to the reader.

We talked a lot about the suicides and the political situation. Writing about politics in a novel is dangerous stuff, but Pamuk carries it off with elan. We agreed that the deceptively simple story held a great deal of complexity, with so many different threads that untangling them would be a worthy subject for a doctoral thesis.

We also talked about the progress of Ka’s pursuit of Ipek. I found it curious that he loved her even before he arrived in town, saying that he is the type of man who “‘. . . can fall in love with a woman only if he knows next to nothing about her.'” However, another person pointed out that this ability to reach across the gulf that separates one person from another and simply fall in love is what redeems us. This disjointed book finally cohered around the image of a snowflake, isolated and unique. Pamuk asks: “How much can we ever know about love and pain in another's heart?” In the end, we cannot understand other people; we don’t know how to read them. We can only love them.

Watching awards shows where people stumble to the podium clutching their lists of people to thank, I’ve sometimes thought that if I were ever to win an award, the first people I would want to thank would be people like the guys at Brentwood who keep my old car running, Paul at Eddie’s who without fail points me to just the right bottle of wine, Jeff Schneider who always has that obscure hardware item that I need for a project, Bernie Severe and his wonderful sons who rescue and refinish my hardwood floors, the folks at Al Pacino’s who make a consistently perfect Queens pizza for my Sunday night treat, the maintenance team (Mike, Jonathan and Grover) who come to my aid when water starts pouring through the ceiling in the middle of the night—all the people, in other words, who make my life possible. Sure, they are getting paid for doing their jobs, but I want them to know that I notice and appreciate how well they are doing them.

In Brockmeier’s richly imagined novel, he alternates the story of a woman—Laura Byrd—who has been left alone in an Antarctic research station with the story of the inhabitants of the City—people who have died but are still remembered. He bases the latter on an African tradition where people are not wholly dead until the last person to know them dies.

This concept of the “living-dead” enables him to pay tribute to the overlapping networks of friends, associates and acquaintances in which even the quietest life is embedded. One of the characters tries to come up with a number, deciding on fifty thousand “or maybe even seventy”. The story brings out the impact we have on each other, however fleeting our contact, and how dependent on each other we are. Characters like Laura who find themselves alone panic and go searching for someone—anyone—to be with.

I don’t mean to make the story sound heavy and philosophical. It’s not. It moves quickly, nimbly weaving together the multiple stories. Most people I’ve talked with read it in one sitting, thinking they’ll read just one more chapter, just one more. Same with me. Aside from quibbles about the realism of some Antarctic details, I found it one of the best and most provocative books I’ve read all year.

Standard practice in making fantasy work is to keep all the other elements as realistic as possible, so the inhabitants of the City live in apartments or houses like ours. They work at mundane jobs such as repairing clocks, running a fitness club, or selling jewelry. At first I thought this unlikely. People mostly complain about their jobs, celebrating hump day on Wednesday and looking forward to TGIF parties, so why after death’s release would they choose to take their jobs up again? I considered habit and boredom. Someone in my book club pointed out that a few people worked in fields that they had always wanted to try.

But the main thing I realised—what we so often forget—is that our work is partly what ties us into the community. However boring or difficult, every job confers that benefit. And, herd animals that we are, we want to be part of a community. So, to all of you whose courtesy and commitment enrich my days and give you a place in my life: thank you.