What I Read in May

Tardier than usual, and we’re off on a baby-sitting gig this week, so I’d better get this posted today. And yet I tarried a bit in the blog hallways, scooting back in curiosity to search out some of my earliest posts to do with reading. I’ll look more later for my first post solely dedicated to book talk, but if you’re wondering what books I was enjoying in July 2007, pop back here for a peek. The post features “random abundance,” so you’ll need to scroll down to #4. (I’m still marvelling that I’ve been “here” almost 16 years!)

I say this every post now, for those who are new here and as a reminder to regular readers: As usual, the numbering comes from my annual handwritten reading journal, and the italicized text below is directly transcribed from that journal’s pages (once upon a time, I simply included photographs of those pages, but too many of you found my handwriting tough to decipher, especially in the photographed format). I’ve used regular font for any additions to my journal notes and included references to any posts from my Instagram Reading account.

27. The Hero of This Book. Elizabeth McCracken. Literary fiction; Auto-Fiction; Disability; Maternal Elegy; Armchair Travel (London).

I loved this — the narrator is a writer still grieving the loss of her mother in a work that the narrator insists is fiction, not memoir — but so insistent is she that the reader must see how thin the line is — memoir or auto-fiction, which, she says, her mother abhorred as a genre. She also, as we arrive at the last pages, tells us what can be told after a death that could not have been put into words before.

And, of course, the mother the narrator describes is physically, temperamentally, and intellectually like the author’s mother, who is recently deceased. That mother is / was a force, clearly. Physically challenged (the last pages spell out the cerebral palsy that limited her mobility, wellness, and strength), she was an inspiration in her refusal to adjust her expectations or dampen her curiosity. As the narrator writes, her own visit to London is in memory of her last trip there with her mother. She marvels at what they were able to do, but also regrets what they hadn’t . . . and she assesses her own movements through the city with an eye on whether or not — or how — her mother could (have) navigate(d) now (then).

This creative non-fiction/novel/auto-fiction “not a memoir” approach is wonderfully suited to limning a mother’s life through an adult daughter’s eyes — and in the process revealing much about the narrating daughter’s life as well.

Descriptions of her parents, their long marriage: “My parents were a sight gag” (he was tall, became corpulent, and she was less than 5 feet). “Opposite otherwise, too. . . . Opposite in every way but their bad habits, which is the secret to a happy marriage and also the makings of a catastrophe.” Catastrophe? Well, the hoarding and the inability (mother) and disinclination (father) to clean, so that shame soon set in and they wouldn’t let anyone but their daughter in . . . until her mother got too ill.

“If you want to write a memoir without writing a memoir, go ahead and call it something else. Let other people argue about it. Arguing with yourself or the dead will get you nowhere.”

Fewer than 200 pages, but I could go on about this; it’s poignant, funny — from droll to slapstick — and illuminating. Recommend highly.

See my Instagram posts here and here.

28. We All Want Impossible Things. Catherine Newman. Literary/Genre fiction; Women’s Lives; Female friendship; Illness; End of Life; Domestic fiction.

There is much to love about this novel of a friend caring for her best friend through that friend’s last weeks of life, while her own life is more than a bit messy and otherwise unfocussed. Apparently, it’s based on the author’s personal experience, and that, plus the numerous glowing reviews it’s received, makes me feel a bit churlish about my own reservations.

But . . . there’s just so much privilege in this experience of death that it distracts me from so much of what it gets right. There’s no denying the perspicacity, the astute observation of that fragile but powerful mixture of beauty and pain, love, joy, sorrow, that are present during the palliative approach to death. The weird realness of that time. The veering between philosophical and/or metaphysical breakthroughs of comprehension alongside the petty thoughts and actions that can be shamefully fierce, insistent. And Newman captures the humour that bursts through, sustains us through these times, surprisingly.

Still, a 50-ish PhD, freelance writer, owns a generous older home, comfortable shabby-chic, where her ex-husband drops in for friendly visits, still loves her. Their daughters, loving and supportive, honest and teasing — even when one walks in on her mother in bed with an inappropriate (boundaries-wise) partner, twice in one week. Two different partners, that is. And daughter doesn’t even know about the third partner, arguably even less appropriate.

I’m sure that it reflects someone’s experience — and I get that sex gets used as a bulwark or antidote against death’s proximity, but it seems a bit Nancy Myers to me. Enjoyable, cathartic, lots of humour, a romance to sweeten the death . . . .I’ve enjoyed Nancy Myers’ films myself, but I guess I’ve fit pretty comfortably into the audience demographic she has in mind. Just saying that I can imagine resenting a narrative like this, to be honest.

29. War in Val D’Orcia: An Italian War Diary, 1943-1944. Iris Origo. Memoir; War Diary; Women’s Lives; Italy.

I’m quite sure a reader recommended this in the comments several months ago, but haven’t been able to recover the source — if you’re reading this now, thank you!

Especially since we’d just walked through this area and recognized so many place names (Radicofani, Acquapendente, Ponte d’Arbia), I found this diary very moving — a compelling account of how quickly and drastically circumstances can change.

Iris Origo was the English wife of a wealthy and well-respected Italian aristocrat (Marchese Antonio Origo). The couple had bought a villa and its estate of 57 run-down farms, 3500 hectares in Southern Tuscany, poor, arid soil, and were modernising, restoring and upgrading, educating the peasant families for whom they were responsible. And then came the War and, in 1943, the arrival of the German forces and the collapse of a democratically elected Italian government.

Origo’s account of how they managed to keep the estate going, caring for their farmer families while also caring for 23 refugee children they were sheltering and for the escaping POWs they helped hide at huge personal risk is gripping, moving, and inspiring, and for me goes far beyond being merely a document of historical events.

It also made me think about how I cope with change, about what courage I would be able to muster, about the strength and goodness so many Italians showed to those in need, as Origo demonstrates — even as war gave so much room for human cruelty.

And so many stories that escape the broader view we often take of big historical events — small stories, perhaps, but such heroism (often played down as a natural extension of everyday values) and resourcefulness.

Apparently — I found this out after some online research motivated by reading Onigo’s diary — just last year a large mine was discovered near Orvieto — where we spent two days this past April — and Italy’s north-south rail system was halted for hours while the mine was deactivated and removed.

Instagram post.

30. Age of Vice. Deepti Kapoor. Crime thriller; romance; family saga; first of trilogy; Set in (near contemporary) India.

Justifiably, this one’s getting a lot of buzz. (Read The Guardian review here.). Set in India (mostly New Delhi) 2004 and onward a few years. Three main characters: Ajay, born into extreme poverty in Uttar Pradesh, is sold into slavery at 8; he is freed to become a cafe server in his teens, and his diligence earns him the offer of employment by the wealthy young man, Sunny. The obvious polish of this second main character, Sunny, is funded by his family’s criminal enterprises, although his family also had roots in Uttar Pradesh.

In fact, Sunny represents the “vulgar new India” that the mother of Neda, the 3rd central character, has railed against. Neda has grown up in a comfortable world which might not have had the luxe and glamour of Sunny’s but which was elite in terms of culture, education, and connections, although as an easy and taken-for-granted background.

The epic novel unspools from a shockingly graphic scene in its opening pages — wealth and poverty literally collding with horrific consequences. Kapoor’s writing makes literary fiction of a page-turning gangster novel (or vice versa). Predictable character trajectories are given sensitively observed details that slow down any knee-jerk judgements we’re inclined to make. . . . So good and apparently the first in a trilogy.

Instagram post here.

31. The Wolves of Winter. Tyrell Johnson. Post-apocalyptic novel; dystopian fiction; coming-of-age; survivalist fiction.

Tautly written post-apocalyptic novel — set in a dystopian near future in which the family of the young female protagonist has moved to the Yukon after having first fled from Chicago to Alaska as a pandemic follows a series of wars. Think Station Eleven meets Hunger Games — wilderness survival, coming-of-age. By the author of The Lost Kings which I read in April. Protagonist is early 20s and I’d be tempted to file this as YA. An entertaining quick read.

Instagram post here.

32. All the Colours of the World. C.S. Richardson. Literary fiction; historical fiction; Art and Art History; WWII; love story; grief.

I loved Richardson’s The Emperor of Paris and The End of the Alphabet (#69 on my 2018 reading list) and am equally smitten by this. In each novel, a poignant narrative of love, pain, and time is made particularly endearing by stylistic and structural challenges or choices of the author. For this novel, Richardson uses a “pillow book” (or commonplace or scrapbook) approach — a collation of facts, anecdotes, pages from an Art History Book, details of discrete events. And further, most pages (numbered at the top as if a chapter) contain references to a colour. This works especially well to tell of young Henry (left — as orphans –with his younger sister, in the care of their Shakespeare-quoting grandmother) who wants to paint, to be an artist — and becomes instead an art historian and teacher.

Born during one Great War, Henry will enlist in another, but only after he’s met and married Alice (once a student of his). I’ll skip over significant plots points here, and simply say that what he experiences in this second World War compounds earlier griefs, but the narrative urges us through the pages toward, ultimately, a kind of redemption.

But at each stop along the way — the sections are slight, never more than a page, several only 4 or 5 sentences — the reader will pause to consider new information: about Oxonian rowing competitions in early 19th century; about the opening in 1922 of Toronto’s Sunnyside Amusement Park; about a newly acquired and elaborate traveller’s paintbox; about the shipwreck that inspired Theodore Géricault’s Scène de Naufrage; about the cultural history of what we now call “post-traumatic stress disorder and, during Henry’s war, was known as “battle fatigue”. And readers will use the pause to meditate about Art and love, war and loss and redemption.

This is one to buy in hardcover (You know that a book by an award-winning book designer of Richardson’s calibre is going to be beautifully wrought by whoever gets that gig!) altho’ I was grateful to borrow a copy from VPL. Slight, at 208 pages, but surprisingly replete.

33. The Porcelain Moon: A Novel of France, the Great War, and Forbidden Love. Janie Chang. Historical fiction; Romance; World War I; Chinese labourers in France; French history. Racism. Asian-Canadian writer.

I overcame my general reluctance to read romance novels set during wartime because of this recommendation. I’ve learned to trust these; if she says a book is worth reading, I put it on hold at the library, stat! The draw for me with this title was the unveiling of France’s use of Chinese workers, before wartime but then in much greater numbers to support war efforts. Despite their significant contribution, these men (who were away from families for years! as were the Chinese labourers who built most of the Canadian National Railroad that runs through my province — which is also Janie Chang’s — British Columbia) suffered poor living conditions in the camps and constant racism.

Well written and well researched, this novel features several strong, smart, and resourceful female characters — as constrained by the French patriarchy as they are by the Chinese — despite the fact that the two young female characters have loving, caring, and supportive father figures.

The novel also offers an interesting and nuanced examination of the way race, gender, and class intersect. An engaging novel that opens up an important chapter of French history and complicates stereotypes of French culture and identity.

And that’s my May reading done and dusted! Have you read any of the books in today’s post? Agree or disagree (or agree and disagree) with my assessments? Have any recommendations of books to read (or to avoid!) from your own recent reading? You know your comments are very welcome here and I look forward to our book chat. Mic’s open now!