New Century Reading

Walking Home

Well, this is a delight. Before he became Britain's Poet Laureate in 2019, Simon Armitage was already a well-known and highly regarded poet in his home country when he decided to do something unusual for him: Go for a long hike. Specifically, he would hike Pennine Way, a trail of great beauty, but also intensely rugged and often in less-than-ideal conditions, including rain and fog. 

Not only was Armitage not much of an athlete, he decided to go against conventional wisdom and do the route from north to south, when guides advocate for the reverse. To up the stakes, he decided to approach the hike from the old tradition of the wandering troubador--he would do poetry readings every night along the route, if locals could provide him the space to do so along with food and shelter.

Armitage's memoir on his experience is wry and self-deprecating as he confesses to missteps and miscalculations, as well as readings that go well, and those that don't. He is met on the trail by various people, some known to him, some not. He gets lost (a frightening aspect in an area that's remote and not well marked) and has too much gear. He learns about the flora and fauna along the way, appreciating it as best he can given the circumstances. 

There's a lot of charm to this book, and for me, much of that charm came from the respect people in Britain have for poets (an ancient tradition there). He gets good crowds at most of his readings. People drive in from long distances to hear him speak, and some join him on the hike. He's a bit of a celebrity. Imagine, a poet being a celebrity! 

I so enjoyed his amiable wanderings, so much so that I started to look at Minnesota maps to see if I could do something similar. But: I'm not a celebrity poet. I also break out in hives at the thought of camping out with strangers night after night. And having to be social at the end of days where I might hike 10-15 miles. Which is to say, it's not going to happen for me. And that's one of the reasons I'm glad Armitage wrote about his experience, so I could live vicariously. 

They Came Like Swallows

They Came Like Swallows is a book I bought early on in the pandemic, interested in literature from other pandemics. But after reading a couple of other books about pandemics, I lost my taste for it. Christmas Day I found myself the recipient of a new, shiny Kindle, one much improved over my tortoise-paced older Kindle, and for some reason, I was inspired to open this book.

I'm glad I did. Can I recommend it to others? Perhaps only with the caveat that this is not a happy book; it's set in late 1918, and the flu pandemic is beginning to rage, and someone key dies. If you're not up for that, I certainly understand. But if you are, this is a lovely book about mourning, regret, loss, and the interiority of all of it. 

Slight spoiler: 

 

Ready?

 

The mother of a young family succumbs to the flu. We see the lead-up and aftermath of her death through the eyes of both of her sons and her husband. How they feel, how they register what's happening, is filtered through each of their points-of-view. That just increases the heartbreak in terms of how little they understand each other and how everyone is working through what's happened. The unnecessary guilt some feel, the laser-sharp focus on certain things they wish they had done differently--Maxwell details this in clean writing, not melodramatic or sentimental, just describing the way things are.

Maxwell's So Long, See You Tomorrow has long been considered his masterpiece. That's not a book I loved the first time I read it. On rereading this summer with an online group, I developed a deeper appreciation for it. But for me, They Came Like Swallows is the better book, clearer, narrower in scope and ambition, and utterly successful. Your mileage may vary, depending on your love/lack thereof for So Long. 

Winter in Sokcho

This is such an odd, but interesting little book, which also, oddly, appears only to be available by Kindle in the U.S. right now, with a print book scheduled for 2021. I've seen it compared to Convenience Store Woman, which is an apt comparison, but Winter in Sokchu stands on its own. 

It's narrated by a young woman living in Sokcho, a city in the far north of South Korea, so far north that North Korea is a very real presence, a frightening one. A popular tourist spot in summer, Sokcho is fairly dismal in winter, cold and dreary in spite of K-pop blaring from radios and neon lights shining from cafes and stalls. This young woman works in a decrepit guest house that isn't terribly busy in winter. Her boyfriend is going to Seoul to become a model. Her mother is the very definition of dysfunctional, berating her daughter for both eating too much and not enough, and suggesting she go to Seoul herself for plastic surgery.

Then a French graphic novelist arrives. He has a series of books involving a hero traveling to different parts of the world, and he's chosen Sokcho as his next location. As she tries to serve him food and launder his clothes, she becomes interested in his work and slowly becomes conscious of the disparate parts of her life and how they fit together to make her who she is. She acts as tour guide, taking him to various local spots to give him a picture of what Sokcho--and she--really is.

The book is short and spare, with recurring themes--the narrator's mother is a fishmonger and specialist in the art of dissecting blowfish to deliver safe fugu from an otherwise toxic fish. The narrator tries to cook many times, but no one seems to like her work. Another guest at the guest house is a woman who's undergone extensive plastic surgery, from which the narrator watches her slowly recover, eventually unpeeling her bandages.

It's not that a lot happens in this book. It's largely character- and place-driven, but what interesting characters, and what an interesting place. When the author tries to describe Normandy to her in terms of how it was affected by WWII, she isn't having it:

"What I mean is you may have had your wars, I'm sure there are scars on your beaches, but that's all in the past. Our beaches are still waiting for the end of a war that's been going on for so long people have stopped believing that it's real. They build hotels, put up neon signs, but it's all fake, we're on a knife-edge, it could all give way any moment. We're living in limbo. In a winter that never ends."

It's a book that starts slow, then grips the reader as you go on. Glad to have read it.

Case Histories

Apparently I read Case Histories some time ago (and watched the TV series), because I rated it on Goodreads, but I didn't remember a thing about it. Which is fine, because it's a twisty, turny set of mysteries that is more fun to read if you don't know the outcome. This is the first in Kate Atkinson's Jackson Brodie series. Brodie is a jaded former ex-cop/current private investigator whose personal life is in shambles. While he's trying to cope with his wife leaving him for another man, not to mention things in his past that haunt him, Brodie has a number of people reach out to him for help, people who don't appear to be in any way connected: Two women trying to find out what happened to their beloved younger sister, who disappeared as a young child; a grieving father whose daughter was murdered in her workplace, but the murderer was never found; a cranky elderly woman who believes people are stealing the cats she so diligently hoards; and a woman who wants him to find her sister, a woman who murdered her husband and disappeared.

Of course, as in any good mystery, there's much more going on than meets the eye, and back stories and memories are faulty to a large degree. In a couple of the cases, I figured out what was going on, but in the others, the endings caught me quite by surprise, but in a believable way. Atkinson is a fantastic writer--her Life After Life and A God in Ruins are among my favorite books ever. This is one of her earlier books, and the heavy plotting doesn't quite hold up by the end; there are tidy bows being tied up in the last few chapters. But the characters were so well drawn and so interesting, with all their individual flaws, that I didn't care. 

So, on to the next Jackson Brodie book: One Good Turn. I don't think I've read any of the other Brodie books, so I suspect I have some fun times ahead. 

Euphoria

After reading and loving Lily King's Writers & Lovers, I had some like-minded readers tell me they prefer her earlier novel, Euphoria. So I have now read it and can't honestly say if I liked one more than the other--they're entirely different books, with different aims and ambitions. But King is a hell of a writer, I can definitely say.

Euphoria is a fictionalized account of a specific time period in anthropologist Margaret Mead's life and career. I know little about Mead, but it doesn't seem to matter (although the novel did lead me to request a bio of her from the library). The premise is that she, her husband, and another young researcher end up in a bit of a work and love triangle in a remote area in New Guinea. The fictional Mead, Nell, is a renowned researcher married to Fen, a jealous (both professionally and personally) researcher who hasn't got her acclaim, and Andrew, who's just learning the ins and outs of studying people in remote areas. 

It's amazing to me that this book is only 257 pages long. King packs a lot in: The ethics involved in anthropology, societal mores, relationships between Western men and women in the early part of the twentieth century--that's just some of what's going on in this thought-provoking book. 

The one quibble I had is that the bulk of the story is told from Andrew's first-person point-of-view. There are a few places where Nell has the narrative, either through third person or through diary entries. I would have liked to be in her side of the story more. She was a fascinating character, and maybe even more of the diary entries would have been enough. But that's a quibble. Otherwise, this was a great read, and like I said, so very different from Writers & Lovers, and it makes me wonder what King will do next.

The True Deceiver

Oh, man, this book made me think so hard it almost broke my brain. Not because it's a difficult read--it's a deceptively (see what I did there?) simple read. On the surface, it's the story of two women in a small Scandinavian village, very remote, the kind of place where everyone knows everyone else's business. Katri Kling is a 20-something living with her younger brother, whom the town regards as "simple." She is fiercely devoted to the truth, and people know better to ask her something they don't really want to know the answer to. But they also know she has a sharp mind and can help them figure out solutions to problems, and while a bit of an outcast, they can trust her.

Anne Aemelin is an older woman who lives alone in an old house far up a hill. Her family had money, and she's earned more by painting highly acclaimed and popular children's books (not unlike author Tove Jansson herself). She's largely content to live alone, but she doesn't have much of a head for business, and her affairs are bit muddled.

Katri wants something that Anne has: Money. So she works out a way to get it, and her plans set into motion a series of events that drastically change both women, leaving them each no longer sure about their place in the community, their sense of trust, their sense of themselves or each other. In the end, it's a book about what constitutes truth and honesty, and who gets to decide? And that's what just about broke my brain.

But I need to read more Jansson. I love everything of hers that I've read. 

Jell-O Girls

Author Allie Rowbottom is a descendant of the family that purchased the Jell-O company from its founders and made a fortune on it. But as her book Jell-O Girls shows, not surprisingly, money doesn't necessarily make for happy lives. Her ancestry is plagued with mental illness, alcoholism, and abuse. If that makes you feel kind of "so what," I get it--do we need more books about privileged white people behaving badly and ending up in terrible places?

Maybe we do, when it comes to this story. Rowbottom smartly doesn't take a "feel sorry for poor pitiful us" approach, but more of a larger historical and anthropological approach. Along with the stories of her mother and grandmother, she includes much of Jello-O's history and how it was altered for the better and worse by different periods of American history, particularly during the 50s, when women were expected to be good homemakers, and the contrasting 60s and 70s, when feminism began to take hold. I personally never had thought much about Jell-O and women's roles in society, but this book gives a fascinating look at how the two compare and contrast. 

But another thing this book does is take a hard look at something that's still a problem today: How the medical field treats women. Rowbottom's mother knew something was wrong in her own body, but it took years before she could get a doctor to take her seriously. Her daughter experienced that too. I've seen people on Goodreads complaining about how this is a book about privileged people being sick, but they're missing the context that Rowbottom is pretty blunt about: Yes, her family is white and privileged. But even white, privileged women can be blown off by medical people, or even told the problem is all in their head, or they're hysterical, when in reality, there are truly physical medical conditions. If these women can't get doctors to take them seriously, how do the rest of us females manage?

Rowbottom ties that to a mysterious outbreak in the town where Jell-O was manufactured for many years, of mostly teenage girls who began exhibiting various symptoms that couldn't easily be explained. She wonders if the ingredients in Jell-O might have been at the root of it, while noting that experts thought it was a kind of mass hysteria, not unlike the teenage girls in the Salem witch trials. 

My one complaint about this book is the graphic, gory descriptions of various medical conditions and treatments. They really add nothing to the book--it's clear the people with the conditions are suffering without us having to be given such vivid detail. I skimmed some of that, and found the rest of the book fascinating. 

The Angel of History

This collection of poems by Carolyn Forche is a stunner, and one I'm sure I only scratched the surface of in reading it for the first time. Forche is writing about hard things here; the aftermath of war, including the Holocaust and the bombing of Hiroshima. She's also writing about the long, hard years postwar in places like the former Czechoslovakia and Hungary. There's so much happening in these poems--how do you recover from these atrocities, both as a person and as a community? How do you survive the memories? How long do you try and hold on to what's lost? 

The epigraph is a quote from philosopher Walter Benjamin: "This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward."

That sets the tone for the book: 

The past is not where you left it, Svetko.
It is a ruined city, spackled with grief,
     The house, still yellow stucco with pear trees.
Empty swallow nests hang in the eaves
     woven with bits of collar and sleeve.
There is a diary open to the words cannot remain here.

A beautiful, heartbreaking, gut-wrenching book that haunts me.

2020 in Books

What a year. I really don't need to say more than that, do I, except that early in the pandemic, I had trouble reading. But after a couple of weeks, my reading mojo came back with a vengeance. I ended up finishing 153 books this year, a personal best. I also completed my year-long goal of reading all of Virginia Woolf's novels in order of publication, which did turn out to be a worthwhile project.

Here are my stats for the year:

Fiction: 74
Nonfiction: 40
YA/children's: 15
Poetry: 16
Classics: 28
Rereads: 19
Female authors (as far as I know in terms of self-identification):  64
Male authors (as far as I know in terms of self-identification): 49

And in no particular order, my faves from the year.

Evidence of V
Take Courage: Anne Bronte and the Art of Life
The Only Plane in the Sky
Abigail
Kyrie
Clap When You Land
Nothing to See Here
Orlando
The Maytrees
A Children's Bible
Hamnet
Writers & Lovers
The Vanishing Half
The Equivalents
Before the Ever After
Such a Fun Age
Leave the World Behind
The Butterfly Lampshade
Red Comet
Transcendent Kingdom

A terrible year on many fronts, but I'll take the consolation of so many good reads.

Miss Iceland

Hekla wants to be a writer, a poet, in the great Icelandic tradition she's grown up in. But there's a problem. It's 1963, and she's a woman--and this is not a time when the Icelandic literary establishment has much regard for female writers. Hekla leaves her rural farm home for Reykjavik, thinking she might have better luck there. She moves in with an old friend from her small town, Jon, a gay man who moved to the country's capitol city in hope of meeting others like him. Both of them need jobs, and they find them: Hekla as a server in a hotel restaurant where she is harassed and ogled, particularly by a man who's determined to get her to compete in the Miss Iceland pageant, and Jon on fishing boats where the work is horrendous and he is bullied and beaten up for being gay.

Hekla, at least, begins to thrive. She works during the day and writes at night. But a trip to the local library introduces her to a librarian poet, who takes a fancy to her, and soon they're living together. Hekla can't bring herself to tell him she too is a poet and writer, sneaking out to Jon's home to do her writing while the poet is hobnobbing with other (male) poets. Eventually something has to give.

That's the story at the heart of Miss Iceland. The title and cover might lead some to think this is a light, frothy story, but it's anything but. In fact, it's fair to say that it's a fairly sorrowful book, although the author's writing style is so spare that the reader doesn't drown in it. Jon's despair at being gay in a time and place that condemns it is heart-wrenching. He follows the news about Martin Luther King's work in the U.S., saying that if King can succeed in making Black people equal, maybe someday the same will be true for gays.

Hekla wants only to write, and to be taken seriously as a writer. She increasingly realizes that may never happen in her home country. Together, she and Jon figure out a path forward for each of them.

I really loved this book, except the ending was abrupt, and I wasn't entirely clear what it meant. But even saying that, it stayed with me for days, kept me thinking about the ending, wishing I knew more of Hekla's life beyond the book, and finally, I ended up requesting another book by the same author from the library. I suspect I will be looking for more work from her.