The Historian

While I may have much more free time now that I have moved, I have significantly less internet. Actually I have no internet at my apartment, as I'm waiting until I can get internet and cable connected at the same time, and currently don't have a fully-functioning TV. All this to say that I'm getting a lot more reading done, but also a whole lot less blogging.

Case in point: I finished The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova back in early August, but haven't had the chance to write about it until now. It was a great book and I thoroughly enjoyed it, but as I've read three books since then, I can't remember it well enough to give it a complete and well-thought-out blog post. And that really is a travesty, as I literally could not put it down and attempted to read while cooking dinner, which happens to be really hard to do when the book is a hefty 689 pages and you're trying to hold it in one hand and stir pasta with the other.

The book revolved around the tracking of the vampire Dracula, mixing fact with fiction and lore to create a hauntingly believable tale that crossed centuries and borders. There were times that I would have to stop myself from reading it at night because while it was absolutely compelling it was often really creepy. It was also very reminiscent of classic novels, featuring multiple family generations and often told through letters. Before I even finished it I recommended it to my sister, explaining it as a combination between Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code and Tracy Chevalier's The Girl with the Pearl Earring. It's full of history, legend, academia, mystery, and a dash of romance.

Multiple friends of mine whose literary taste I trust had recommended this book to me, so despite being hesitant about reading a bestseller about vampires (been there, learned that lesson), I added it to this year's list anyway, and am glad that I did. This was a great novel.

A Room with a View

I know I’ve been neglecting this blog a little lately – okay, more than a little, it’s been over two months since I last posted, which is not at all like me. I’ve been really busy, I promise! Since I last updated with my review of The Help, I was hired full-time at my office (yay!) and finally made the move to Columbus (double yay!!). Unfortunately I totally missed finishing a book in the month of July. At one point I thought I would be able to make it in the last few days of the month, only to realize that I had got September’s book instead. Sigh.

So now that I’m in my own place, and have a lot more free time on my hands, I was able to get and read July’s book, A Room with a View by E. M. Forester. The novel is about a young woman and her chaperone traveling in Italy sometime before the First World War, with a major theme being the societal roles of women at the turn of the last century. The young female lead, Lucy, is quite an independent young woman, especially for her time period. She wants to learn and have adventures but all of those things are considered “unladylike” and instead she is expected to do a little traveling, meet a nice young man, settle down and get married. While she is in Italy with her older cousin Charlotte they stay at a pension (a term I learned while reading The World According to Garp) and meet the eccentric novelist Eleanor, two kind elderly sisters traveling the world, a kindhearted and funny but socially improper gentleman, and his young son, George, who, if he lived today, would be exactly like Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s character in (500) Days of Summer: a sad, creative hipster hoping to meet a Manic Pixie Dream Girl.

While Lucy doesn’t quite fit the mold of the uber-bubbly and quirky as the stock Manic Pixie Dream Girl, she is a kind and thoughtful young woman that everyone seems to be drawn to. She has two men in her life: the successful and traditional but boring and condescending Cecil, and the odd and progressive but exciting and romantic George. The two men represent the conflicting parts of her life: the conventional lady that her elders expect her to be, and the unconventional woman that she wants to be. Should she follow societal norms and become the perfect hostess and housewife, or follow her own heart and strike out on her own, getting a flat in London and seeing the world her own way?

What I loved about Lucy is that despite being innocent and naïve to a point, she also knows that she is, and longs to discover things for herself. She is constantly frustrated and people telling her what she can do and what she can’t and how she should feel and what she should want. In an important scene where she (Spoiler Alert!) breaks her engagement with Cecil, she tells him,

“I won’t be protected. I will choose for myself what is ladylike and right. To shield me is an insult. Can’t I be trusted to face the truth but I must get it second-hand through you?”

In a wonderful moment for ladies everywhere, she chooses to think for herself instead of succumbing to those who try to control her life. Good for you, Lucy! She may not know exactly what she wants for her life, but she knows what she doesn’t. In the end, it’s almost as if she were the emotional, brooding creative type (she plays the piano exquisitely) who needed a Manic Pixie Dream Guy like George Emerson, who runs around in his shorts after playing in mud puddles and kisses her amongst the violets without asking her first, to show her what life is really like.

I really enjoyed this novel, and could tell it was written at the cusp of the flapper era, where women like Lucy often did the unconventional. It reminded me of a mix between Pride and Prejudice and The Importance of Being Earnest, with a little bit of modern British romantic comedies stirred in for good measure.

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The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

I've finished my final book of the year! And with two days to spare, too.

I decided to finish out the year with Michael Chabon's The Adventures of Kavalier & Clay because compared to the rest of the books on my 2011 list, it seemed a little less serious. Over the past 12 months I've read heavy-handed titles like Atlas Shrugged and Satanic Verses so in contrast a novel about a couple of young men in the comic book business seemed easy.

I really enjoyed this novel. Spanning close to 20 years in the lives of cousins Sam Clay and Joe Kavalier as they start drawing The Escapist in the late 1930s/early 1940s, it gives us a glimpse into the golden age of comics. This is the time when Superman and all of the rest of the big name heroes were selling hundreds of thousands of copies, comics were being shipped to soldiers overseas along with their chocolates and cigarettes, and every kid wanted to grow up to be a masked man in tights. Comic books have never really left since they were first introduced into American culture, and although they are growing in popularity again it is nothing like what they had after WWI.

While a lot of the story revolves around the comic business, the story is essentially about the lives of the two young Jewish men. Sammy was raised by a single mother, his father a traveling performer who only visited when it was convenient. Joe lived with his parents and younger and brother in Prague, but was able to escape before the Nazis invaded, and came to live with Sammy. The two become fast friends after realizing that Sam excels at storytelling while Joe is an excellent artist and can partner up to create wonderful comic books. They create The Escapist based on Joe's experiences as an apprentice to a magician back in Prague, which goes on to become a best-selling character.

Throughout the novel we see Sam struggle to come to terms with homosexuality, both in his own life an in his comics (there is a huge scandal about the young male sidekicks that accompany nearly all masked heroes and what this insinuates). He spends the majority of his life unhappy after years of hiding his true identity for the sake of his friends and family. Joe, on the other hand, works hard to bring his brother and the rest of his family to America, putting all of time, effort, and money into doing so. He finds love but feels guilty being happy when his family is facing war in Prague. When he learns of his young brother's death he leaves town and joins the war in hopes of killing a German in retaliation, and endures a horrible time stationed in Antartica before coming back and hiding from everyone he knows, believing them to live a better life without him.

There are lots of levels to this novel, and it is written so it might flow together simply and easily. This book reminded me of something else I've read, although I can't put my finger on what. The Blind Assassin?  A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius? Special Topics in Calamity Physics? This is a wonderful, sweeping book and it is no wonder that it is a Pulitzer Prize winner. I would recommend it to anyone, especially those with a penchant for comic books and their creators.

Eat Pray Love

It's been six months now since I made my New Year's resolution to read a book every month and blog about it. I think I'm doing pretty well - I've finished all 6 novels for a total of over a million words (thanks to Atlas Shrugged!). I'm really enjoying this discipline of reading, I may set up a reading list for every year!

So this month the choice novel was Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia by writer Elizabeth Gilbert. I've been curious about it, since it's gained so much attention in recent years - but was skeptical for the same reason. Suddenly this book comes out of nowhere and is not only a bestseller but is in Oprah's book club and is being adapted for the big screen starring America's favorite leading woman? The last book with that track record was The Da Vinci Code - and as much as I enjoyed it, I would never put it on a list of my favorite novels.

I asked around and got some mixed reviews. Some liked it, some thought Gilbert was crazy and felt less crazy by comparison. I was a bit apprehensive. I'd enjoyed all the books I'd read so far, was this one a bad decision?

I started it early in the month, just in case I hated it and it took me the entire month to finish. I was pleasantly surprised to find that I loved it, and finished it within two days. I don't know if it's because I'm partial to this type of non-fiction, or if on some level I related to Gilbert, or if she's just a really fantastic writer. Maybe it's all of those. I was enthralled by her openness and her desire to find God, no matter what it took. It was fascinating to be in her shoes and experience her growth as it unfolded.

Not to mention the descriptions, the characters she met, the beautiful locales she chose. I wish I could take a year off to travel and think and adventure and write. Oh, to be rich!

I'd love to be able to go more in-depth about the characters I loved and the wonderful concepts that Gilbert spoke about, but honestly, I read this book over a month ago (I started the first draft of this blog June 6, and ran out of time to finish it!). It was by no means a literary masterpiece but I enjoyed it nonetheless. Maybe someday I'll reread it and do an official recap blog.

Without further ado, on to next month's reading!

Atonement

I love it when I finish a book and find myself loathing a character. Not just being frustrated at the outcome, or being glad that the book is over, but really, really disliking a character, no matter how empathetic you are expected to be. This doesn’t include typical villains, like Sauron from Lord of the Rings, Voldemort from Harry Potter, or Satan in Paradise Lost; but normal characters that do something so terrible that when the book is finished you really hate them.

I’ve always considered this creation of loathsome characters to be the sign of a great writer. I have a lot of respect for an author who can craft someone in such a fascinating way that in the end I dislike them as much as if they had wronged me personally. One writer I admire for her ability to make me hate her characters is Edith Wharton. The first novel of hers that I read was The House of Mirth, published in 1905. A classic novel of manners dealing with 1890s American aristocracy, the book centered around character Lily Bart, a young woman offered everything, but who causes scandal after scandal, turns her back on the man she loves because he isn’t wealthy, and finally dies of an overdose because she is unhappy. After spending an entire novel watching a spoiled brat complain that her life was too hard, I wasn’t surprised – or sad – when Lily Bart was dead. I remember my kind, grandmotherly literature professor being completely dumbfounded that I wasn’t upset that the character died at the end.


All that to say, the novel I read for February – Atonement by Ian McEwan – is another such book. Like Wharton, McEwan’s prose is beautifully written and captures the life of the upper class of a bygone era. His phrases and descriptions made even the most mundane events, like a puddle drying in the sun, seem simultaneously beautiful, delicate, shameful and heartbreaking. The point of view changed a couple of times, bringing to life the minds of an elderly woman full of regret, a young WWII soldier wrongfully accused, and a pretentious little girl with clarity and detail. All the while making me despise one of the characters.

Unlike Lily Bart, who squandered her life feeling sorry for herself, McEwan’s character Briony Tallis spends her life attemting to make atonement for a terrible mistake she made as a child. One summer as a young girl she oversees the budding romance between her sister Cecilia and Robbie, the son of a family servant. Completely misunderstanding what is going on between them, she considers Robbie a deviant and publicly blames him when a visiting cousin is raped. Because of her witness Robbie is sent to prison and later becomes an English soldier while her sister abandons the family for implicating him and becomes a nurse in spite of her prestigious college education. Eventually Briony grows up and comes back into the storyline again after a lengthy section chronicling Robbie’s war experience and his relationship with his love, Cecilia. Now Briony herself is a nurse, trying to remain tied to Cecilia and Robbie through this choice of profession, and after confronting them to apologize plans to retract her witness statement and clear Robbie’s name.


There the novel abruptly switches, and it is revealed that the entire novel to this point is actually Briony’s final manuscript, finished and ready to publish. She is now in her seventies and is preparing to print her book and set the record straight. As much as I disliked Briony for her eagerness to jump to conclusions and sticking her nose where it didn’t belong in her childhood, it was nothing compared to how much I loathed her in the final pages. There Briony confesses that the end of the novel is false – Cecilia and Robbie did not get back together, but both of them died young without ever seeing each other again. She never apologized or retracted her statement, but instead lived life as a successful writer and penned the book, with the happier ending, as an atonement for her wrongs.


Reading the end of this book I was reminded of another college professor who taught us to remember that the single narrator is action the most unreliable. Without any other testimonies they can easily fool the reader into believing whatever they want them to. Briony is that narrator. Even though in the epilogue she claims to have written in honor of Cecilia and Robbie, it seems to me that she’s really doing all of this to clear her own name. She writes the portion of her transgression so that she is at fault but we are inclined to forgive her due to her childhood innocence. She presumptuously writes about the other characters thinking of her when they are away, and punishes herself by not letting the fictional versions of them forgive her, as if this could make up for never actually telling the truth.

I liked the way this book was written – sort of like last month’s book, with great description, dialogue, and multiple point-of-view changes – but in the end I felt completely duped by Briony’s chracter and hated her; not just for fooling me but for ruining the lives of all the other characters. What is the real truth of what happened? Why was Briony such a coward as to never contact her sister and tell her she had lied? What good was it to write a nice story about them after everyone it effected was dead? 


This book exasperated me, but like I said, making me angry at the characters proves to me what a great writer the author is. Also as the above professor said, a movie or book that continues to stick with you is probably a good one. This one was definitely good.

And on a lighter note, I can finally watch the movie adaptation I bought in the $5 bin a few years ago!