Author: Seth Grahame-Smith

2010, Grand Central Publishing

Filed Under: Historical, Horror, Humor

Seth Grahame-Smith is the same guy who wrote Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and it shows. This is a good thing, PPZ was excellent–a great mix of classic literature and zombie mayhem. The transition from “literary mash-up” to fake biography was a wise move–the Quirk books after PPZ have been disappointing. I lamented that Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters (review) wasn’t as good because it was too inventive, and not true enough to its source. But basically I figured that Winters just wasn’t as good as Grahame-Smith. I’m currently about halfway through Android Karenina, also by Winters, and while it’s not all that good either, I’m realizing it’s not so much the author’s lack of talent but lack of novelty: a truly good horror/literary mash-up probably will only work once.

This book is not a drastic departure from its predecessor but it manages to feel fresh. ALVH is made of the same essence; I’d call it respectful parody. This novel is written in the manner of a biography, as if Lincoln’s secret journals fell into Grahame-Smith’s lap. It works well. (He said in an author interview he was inspired to write this because he found it curious seeing a bunch of Abe Lincoln bios sitting beside Twilight on a bookstore bestseller shelf.) …
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Authors: Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows

2008, The Dial Press

Filed Under: Literary, Historical, Romance

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (I’m going to call it GLAPPPS from here) is an epistolary novel occurring immediately post World War II. At its heart, it’s a subdued romance, though on the surface it’s a tale of community and friendship and bravery and belonging. Not really my kind of book. Still, I liked it.

Juliet wrote a column for a London newspaper during the war. When she hears of the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie society, she becomes intrigued by the name alone–as, I admit, I was with the title of this book. She writes letters to a number of the inhabitants of the small British island, and slowly begins to cultivate fondness for, then relationships with, many of them. Most especially the kind and quiet Dawsey Adams (who, I should note, reached out to Juliet and informed her of the society in the first place).

The society originated on the occupied Channel Island as an excuse to have dinner parties under the noses of the Germans. As the occupation stretched, and with it the lack of news from the mainland, the false literary pretense of the group became real, a connection to culture and community. Eventually the pigs they were eating in secret ran out, along with much of the rest of the island’s food. The society continued, with the dinners replaced with the best they could come up with: most creatively, potato peel pie. …
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Author: Glenn Taylor

2010, Ecco

Filed under: Literary, Historical

The Marrowbone Marble Company is a sprawling, epic novel that spans nearly thirty years, following a man named Ledford as he fights in World War II, raises a family, builds a marble factory with his own hands, and, through it all, fights against racism. Taylor effortlessly constructs a detailed, nuanced world, and a host of characters both stoic and relatable. He also excels at pacing a narrative with such a long story window—each chapter is titled after a month, like “December, 1941,” and he often skips years at a time, but the result feels natural and fluid.

The problems here are more philosophical than technical. If you had to sum up Marrowbone‘s subject matter in one word, it would be: race. The titular marble company isn’t just a company, it’s also a racial safe haven where, in 1949 West Virginia, blacks and whites live and work together in equality and harmony.

Despite loud, sometimes violent protests from nearly everyone around him, Ledford (who is white) insists on racial equality in his business and his life. That’s well and good, if a bit simplistic, but the results stretch believability, to say the least. The way the sides are drawn up is reductive: everybody who’s in favor of Marrowbone (which becomes synonymous with non-discrimination and civil rights) is good and decent; everybody opposed is cowardly, evil, and slimy.

In the end, Marrowbone is more of an exercise in historical race-relations wish-fulfillment than a real drama. That keeps it from being the truly great novel it could’ve been, but it’s still captivating and certainly worth reading. …
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[This novel is a C4 Great Read.]

Author: Edward P. Jones

2003, Amistad

Filed Under Literary, Historical

It’s difficult to decide where to start discussing The Known World.  The novel opens and closes in 1855 on the plantation of Henry Townsend, a black slave-owner living in Manchester County, Virginia.  In between, the narrative casts so far into the past and the future that beginnings and endings seem to merge.  The past is ever present, and the future provides historical context for events yet to pass.  The Known World begins and ends in nearly every paragraph.

I admit it’s confusing at first.  The prose is full of time cues, reminding the reader of where the story is and of the order in which certain events fall.  You’ll probably have to reread early passages or even the entire first chapter, but once you get used to the rhythm of it, my guess is you’ll be hooked.  Jones’ manages to make all the temporal pointing sound like a refrain, and soon the novel starts to read like a long hymn to history. …
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This book has been chosen as a Great Read

Author: Wallace Stegner

1938

Filed Under Literary, Historical, Western

A friend of mine loaned me The Big Rock Candy Mountain as the capstone to a conversation about Great American Novels.  Wallace Stegner is an author I’d heard a lot about but never read.  As a novice, I was a little intimidated by the bulk of the book.  My friend assured me it was well worth the 563 page commitment.  And it was.  That and more.

The Big Rock Candy Mountain is an American saga about the trials of the Mason family. Set against the historical sweep of the early 20^th century, the closing of the West, the First World War, the Roaring Twenties, and the Great Depression, Bo Mason leads his wife and sons in the reckless pursuit of their fortune, leaving his wife Elsa to salvage a life for all of them in the margins of her husband’s endless ambitions. …
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Author: Robert Löhr, translated from the German by Anthea Bell

2007, Penguin

Filed under Literary, Historical

Truth: Wolfgang von Kemplen was a lower-echelon Hungarian aristocrat who built a clockwork automaton of wood and iron in the late 18th century, and managed to deceive crowds of people (including luminaries like Johann Philipp Ostertag and Edgar Allen Poe) that it was a thinking machine that excelled at chess. Only years after Kemplen’s death was the secret compartment, which could hold a tiny man, revealed to the public.

Fiction: Just about everything that happens in this charming and at times gripping story about Kemplen’s machine, including the existence of Tibor, the devoutly Catholic dwarf from Italy, who excelled at chess and acted as the brain of the wonderous chess automaton.

In the novel, Kemplen enlists Jakob, a Jewish craftsman, and Tibor, a chess whiz who can fit inside the tiny compartment. Together the three men pull the wool over the eyes of an entire society. The machine, known as “the Turk,” gains notoriety quickly; as fame builds, so does pressure. You might think this would be a story about external forces pushing against a secret, trying to crack the nut, and the characters’ resistance to that. And there is some of that. But much of the dramatic tension derives from the relationship between the three men, their moral drives to keep or reveal the secret, and plenty of two-faced backstabbery. …
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Drop everything and read One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Márquez, now. See other entries in this series here.

Gabriel García Márquez does not blend fantasy and reality into one surreal realm.  Mr.Márquez creates instead an environment where each sphere vies for dominance.  The reader might forget whether the novel takes place on the Earth the reader understands viscerally until he or she stumbles upon one ethereal scene that impresses upon the reader the book’s dual nature before it dissolves and allows reality to resume.  However, I defy the reader to confess that he or she did not feel Mr. Márquez’s universe as the reader feels his or her flesh.

He had not stopped desiring her for a single instant.  He found her in the dark bedrooms of captured towns, especially in the most abject ones, and he would make her materialize in the smell of dry blood on the bandages of the wounded, in the instantaneous terror of the danger of death, at all times and in all places.

This narrative manifests for the reader physical and emotional impressions as deeply as a rifle’s butt dully collapsing a soldier’s skull.  It is not whimsy that makes so powerful the author’s writing.  It is intent.  To doubt that Mr. Márquez did not want to thrust a people’s reality into the reader’s side is to miss his motivation. …
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Drop everything and read Let the Great World Spin, by Colum McCann now. See other entries in this series here.

The book ended, dammit.  It ended and I’ve been ruined for novels since.

I can’t even tell you if it’s anything like McCann’s other books.  I’ve tried to read one, but always I close it after a few sentences, because its prose—adept enough, beautiful enough, intriguing enough—is breaking my heart.  Just because it isn’t Let the Great World Spin.

I know people who’ve gone to see “Avatar” two, three, four times, because they can’t handle the shock of being thrust back into the real world.  I get that impulse.  But—screw the too-pretty, vapid, light-wreathed world o’ the giant Smurfs.  Let the Great World Spin in the world I want to stay in, because it’s messy and human and hard and true.

Did that sound like a cliché?  My apologies, but I am not alone.  You need only glance at the reviews for this book to realize that attempting to describe it reduces people to vague, grasping hyperbole and lots of uses of the word “human.”  Even basic description seems to elude reviewers.  It’s a New York novel!  That opens in Ireland.  It’s about Philippe Petit’s famous tightrope walk across between the Twin Towers!  Not “about,” not really.  It’s written in the voices of several unconnected characters!  Define “unconnected.”  It’s a 9/11 novel!  That takes place decades before the towers fell.  (And yet it is, sort of: Before those planes flew into the towers, no one imagined they really could.  And before a man strung a wire between the two towers and walked across, well, no one dared imagine that, either.)

A friend who had not seen the documentary movie “Man on Wire” told me she thought the tightrope walker a metaphor for God, the way beauty and wonder (and terror, anything that grand in its ambition) exist all around us, utterly unconcerned with us.  Our lives are steeped in them, but we rarely notice.

True, but it’s McCann who’s the god here, his orchestration that adept.  The characters in Let the Great World Spin are rarely physically alone.  They share rooms and scenes despite different genders, different ethnicities, different ages, and McCann slides into each of their voices as though to say see, we really are all just human.  But the effect never lets you forget that each is—that we all are—alone, suspended in our individual consciousnesses and mortal.

It’s not a perfect book.  As other reviewers have pointed out, some of the voices—particularly the prostitutes’—are a little forced, some of the coincidences a little too coincidental.  Perhaps I should make this urgent a case only for a perfect book.   But what is perfection?  How human would that be?  At the book’s heart is the messy complexity of life.  At its heart is that full impulse, that full drive.

Read it, it will make you happy to be alive.

And then it will end, and you will be ruined for awhile.

I truly am sorry about that.

.

(Somewhat) Similar reads: Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine; Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathon Safren Foer; Things I Like About America: Personal Narratives by Poe Ballantine; the short story “Future Emergencies” by Nicole Krauss.  And, of course, a documentary: “Man on Wire.”

This book has been chosen as  a Great Read

Author: Anthony Pagden

2008, Random House

Filed under Nonfiction, Historical

So I’ll say right away that I really enjoyed Worlds at War (I’ve nominated it a Great Read). I don’t have much experience with history books, so writing this review was a tad tricky. It would take 3000 words to summarize this book even cursorily, so I can’t do that.  Therefore, this review is pretty short, but please don’t mistake my brevity for disregard. …
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Author: Peter Ackroyd

2009, Nan A. Talese

Filed under Sci-fi, Historical, Horror

I bought this book on a dorky impulse (it’s the sort of thing that occurs often), mostly because Frankenstein is one of my favorite novels, and because I had recently read John Kessel’s awesome short story, “Pride and Prometheus.” Peter Ackroyd does Shelley’s book justice, deftly weaving historical fiction into the classic’s universe. The book offers a retelling of the famous monster story. In this version, Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory is in a London warehouse (he’s from Switzerland), and he is best friends with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who of course was Mary Shelley’s husband. The mixing in of the biographical fiction is a welcome change for the familiar plot, and Ackroyd’s experience with historical fiction lends a feeling of freshness. …
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