February Reading

February, of course, is a short month, but with a fair bit of gloomy weather I found ample time for reading, comfortably ensconced on the couch with a cup of tea.

Ample time to read six books, in fact: one taut mystery/thriller, very good; a memoir I’m highly recommending; and four novels I’m also recommending with all my thumbs up. Following are, as usual for these posts, transcriptions of the handwritten entries in my Reading Journal, numbered from the beginning of the year. Transcriptions in italics with the occasional added comment in regular font as well as links to posts on my Instagram books account.

11. Changer l’eau des fleurs, Valérie Perrin. Read in French; Literary fiction; Set in France; Loss and mourning; Death of a child; Marriage; Love; Recovery. Highly recommended.

My sister-in-law told me about this one, published in an English translation as Fresh Water for Flowers (I found out later that she hadn’t read it yet!), and when I learned it had originally been written in French, I bought the e-book as my next French reading project. Such an engaging novel, although the structuring element is very sad, the loss of a young child.

Not surprisingly, then, when she finds her infatuation for a physically beautiful young man is returned — in sexual attention, at least — she makes the relationship work although it soon becomes obvious her (eventual) husband is incapable of emotional generosity. But Violette pours her nurturing and her joy for life, creativity, etc., into raising her daughter, and she even manages small ways to lift them both out of the paucity of their life as train-crossing guardians (she takes on all this work herself, never able to sleep more than 5 or 6 consecutive hours before another train comes through; her husband never willing to cover even one crossing).

Without giving away too much of the story (and the structuring of its many layers, clever and effective, keeping readers impatient to know what’s next but also giving us much to think about each time the forward momentum is paused) Violette makes an important connection, after her daughter’s death, to the cemetery in which the little girl is memorialized. And she finds a way to move there and build a new life. Her husband moves with her at first, but disappears after a year or two . . . and the mystery of how or where or why is an important strand of the narrative. A strand which brings the possibility, at least, of romantic love back into Violette’s life.

Wonderful characters brought together in the unlikely setting of a cemetery. And I’d love auto-didact Violette to meet Renée, the prickly concierge in Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog.

Highly recommended, whether you read it in French or English. Let me know what you think!

Instagram post here.

12. I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death, Maggie O’Farrell. Memoir; Mortality; Illness/Disability; Parenting; Women’s Lives.

What an idea for a memoir — telling one’s life, essentially, through one’s experiences at the borders of mortality! Of course, few of us have as many such experiences as O’Farrell has had, nor do many of us have anything like her ability to observe, analyze and articulate these.

I very much appreciated O’Farrell eschewing a chronological ordering of these experiences — instead, she plays at an anatomical approach instead and begins with Neck (1990), skips back to Lungs (1988) before going back to her early childhood (1977) in which she was almost hit by a car as she bolted across the street. Backward and forward and through different body parts until, in the last quarter of the book she arrives at Cerebellum (1980) and we find out more about the crippling illness that O’Farrell was not expected to recover from. She’s referred to its impact and continuing effects throughout the memoir, mostly glancingly, but now she describes it in detail through the eyes, the perceptions, of her eight-year-old self. It is excruciating and it is painfully but valuably instructive.

And it informs the ensuing pages, in which she writes about her daughter’s hyper-sensitivity (allergies) to a wide variety of triggers. The constant pain and discomfort and disability and unwelcome visibility her daughter suffers because of her skin’s reactions to the world she lives in. And the terror her parents live with because of the threat to her respiratory system of anaphylactic shock.

Again, highly recommended although perhaps too difficult for some.

I should add that as difficult as some of the material is, Maggie O’Farrell (whom you will know from her novel Hamnet, or Instructions for a Heat Wave, or The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, among others — I’m still working on her backlist) has nonetheless made this an engaging book to read. The structure, pace, and style of her memoir give the reader places to rest, to ponder, to be diverted and entertained — and to admire the way that these “brushes with death” seem to have fortified the writer’s appreciation for life. My Instagram post is here.

13. Pachinko, Min Jin Lee. Historical fiction; Literary fiction; Generational saga; Korean-American writer; female writer; Korea/Koreans 20th century; Koreans in Japan; Diaspora; Ethnicity; Longing and Belonging; Home/homelessness; Family.

A generational saga tracing the descendants of a Korean couple, young newyleds in the early 20th century, whose only daughter then becomes pregnant (still unmarried) in the early 1930s by a wealthy Korean from Japan. The daughter’s eventual move to Japan exposes her to the Japanese prejudice against Koreans, which becomes even more pronounced as WWII advances.

And even though her children grow up in Japan and the family eventually prospers or at least achieves some material and financial stability, citizenship is out of reach, school entry and employment opportunities limited. Hence the appeal of work in the Pachinko parlours that give the novel its name. These offer Koreans born in Japan the opportunity to provide their children a better life, but they also expose them to connections with a criminal underworld and to more scorn from ethnic Japanese.

Love, romance, family ties, strong women, parent-child relationships, and 20th-century history and politics. Many of you will already have read this, but if not, I’d recommend adding it to your list.

Instagram post here (with comments from other readers who also loved this book)

14. This Is What Happened. Mick Herron. Spy Thriller. Set in London.

I happened to notice that Paul was reading a book by Mick Herron, had picked it up by chance at the library, so serendipity delivered this one to me. It’s not of the Slough House series but a cunning stand-alone that I gulped happily. Spy territory and a young woman hoping to remake her life/luck, risking all for a man who’s working to save the world as it’s known in London, post-Brexit. She agrees to help him. And is almost successful in her (admittedly very naïve) mission. Until all goes Very! Wrong!

This one’s a fast read, very entertaining. . . clever twist. . .

15. The Island of Missing Trees, Elif Shafak. Literary fiction; historical fiction; Cyprus, 20th-century history; ethnic conflict; love across ethnic divisions; depression/suicide; diaspora; expat-life; British immigrants; adolescent girl; eco-criticism.

In England, some months after her mother’s suicide, a 16-year-old shocks herself, her classmates, and her teacher by screaming a scream that goes on and on, unstoppable. She’s torn by reluctance to let her father know what she’s feeling/thinking and her growing need to learn about her background, about the family she never got to know, back in Cyprus.

She pushes both her father — a Greek Cypriot — and her mother’s sister (Turkish Cypriot, hasn’t visited once since the girl’s mother left for England before the girl was born; is only meeting her niece for the first time, months after the loss of sister/mother/wife), pushes them for answers about their past which, she argues, is also hers.

We’re taken by various narrators — including the clone of a very old fig tree, a clone re-rooted in England, buried for safety against winter frosts of the colder climate — through the past of the girl’s parents, their forbidden romance, the young love made impossible by civil war, and then their meeting again years later in the aftermath, the attempted reconciliation.

Bees, birds, numerous plants besides the sentient fig tree broaden the novel’s perspective far beyond the anthropocentric and we see the cost of human culture and conflict on the larger (and smaller) ecosystems. Sorrow, horror, hatred, love, resilience, tenderness, humour — all here. Thoughtfully so, never sentimental or sensational.

Recommended. My Instagram post here. And I’ve posted before about other novels by Elif Shafak: 10 Minutes, 38 Seconds in this Strange World, The Bastard of Istanbul, and Three Daughters of Eve.

16. Sorrow and Bliss, Meg Mason. Literary fiction; Darkly comic; Comedy of manners; mental illness; marriage; dysfunctional families; sisterhood; parenting; childlessness.

Loved this so much! About marriage and love and dysfunctional families, sisterhood and resilience — but also, because resilience can seem an unrelenting demand these days, mental health/illness and depression and despair and the failure of a medical system to provide adequate support.

Briefly, Martha — bright, talented, funny, but since her late teens susceptible to profoundly bleak periods, under-employed, self-sabotaging. The good in her life seems to be her (second) husband, Patrick. But her life shrinks and his expands, and as good as he is, she will not have a baby with/for him — while her sister has 1, 2, 3 boys and then a little . . . well, no spoilers in these pages. . .

Not sure why I found this novel so relevant — I’m not childless, don’t suffer from debilitating mental illness, and there might be some codependency in my pretty good marriage, but that’s probably just the nature of the beast. But I kept stopping at passages to reread and nod and chuckle at, or just to say “Huh.” Such well-chosen anecdotal illustrations, small observations. I think I have to buy my own copy so that I can read passages aloud to dinner guests. Ha!

Recommended, obviously! Instagram post here.

That’s it for February reading, and I’m rather pleased with my self for getting this post up in the first third of the month following. Probably won’t happen again for a while, but why not celebrate the small achievements, right? I will also celebrate each and every one of your comments here, whether about titles here that you have also read — agree or disagree with my reports or want to expand on them — or titles here you haven’t read yet but are planning to. . . or other titles you’ve read and enjoyed lately and want to recommend. . . or you’ve read and want to warn us away from. . . All literary grist for our conversational mill here (if you’ll excuse the misshapen, overstretched analogy). Comments very welcome and the microphone is now yours.