The Emperor's Children and In The Drink

With summer comes the inevitable Summer Beach Read. The SBR was created so that one could read, doze and pick up again without having to re-read the previous page. The topic should be lighthearted with easy to remember characters and plain vocab that doesn't require dragging along a dictionary. My most recent two books met most of these requirements.

The first, a book club pick, The Emperor's Children by Claire Messud, detailed the lives of a handful of 30 something adults living in Manhattan. The second, a several years old hand me down from friend and former bar night buddy, Tishka, called In The Drink by Kate Christensen detailed the lives of a handful of 30 something adults living in Manhattan.

This summer has not produced the number of weekend beach days that I normally enjoy, so I've been imagining my front porch and inside sofa (with a soft breeze coming in from the window), as my beach. Since I haven't had to take frequent cool offs in the water, I was able to speed through these books. Being nearly 30 myself I was anticipating identifying with the characters in The Emperor's Children, but instead found their lives to be completely incongruous with mine; Marina is entitled, spoiled, and self centered. She lives with her parents and is unemployed, save for a manuscript she's been working on for seven years. Her close friend Danielle is slightly better off-- she has a "real" job and lives on her own, but is professionally and personally unfulfilled. Any respect I had for her I lost completely when she started an affair with Marina's famous father. Julian is their token gay and ethnic friend. I refer to him as such because he has no real function in the context of the rest of their lives. It's unclear to me what any of them have in common. Oh, he is mostly unemployed as well. Marina's 19 year old cousin, Frederick "Bootie" Tubb is the catalyst character and the most interesting and dynamic. Whereas the rest of them are filled with ennui, Bootie sets out and repeatedly makes changes to his unhappy life. I was pleased that the novel ended as it did.

Claudia is the primary character of In The Drink and she, along with her friends William, Jane and a few others whose names I've already forgotten, could easily be friends with the gang from The Emperor's Children. Claudia is an alcoholic with a dead end job (commisserate with Julian!) as a personal secretary to a socialite Jackie (who could float in the same circle as Marina's father, Murray Thwaite). She longs to write her own books (talk to Marina) instead of ghostwriting Jackie's. She doesn't eat well, she is broke, lives in a cruddy apartment and drinks too much. She has an on again off again affair with a married man (compare notes with Danielle) and makes no effort to improve her situation. In The Drink was similar to The Devil Wears Prada and any number of the other books that feature loser young adults living in Manhattan. I cringed while reading this book and couldn't imagine anyone with so little self esteem...and I subsequently felt miserable and depressed after reading it.

I need to change directions with my next book...no more beach reads! Or, maybe I just need to get off the couch and to the beach...

Netflix stars for both books: 2/5.

The Painted Veil

I watched The Painted Veil this weekend and really enjoyed it. In fact, I enjoyed it more than the book. The film deviated fairly significantly from the book...where the book was more conceptual, the film added some plot elements that fleshed out the era and the characters. Kitty was a more sympathetic character in the movie-- she was more apologetic for her transgressions and seemed to come around to loving her husband, Walter, as well as her situation. The movie did not go into so much detail on Waddington, ironically the only character I liked in the book. There was more a threat of nationalistic uprising in the movie-- something not touched upon at all in the book, although likely an accurate concern for the time period (China, 1920s).
The highlight of the movie was the scenery. The movie was filmed on location in China, and the deep mist filled moutains and rivers are truly beautiful.
In short, this movie stands on its own. It is a different from the book and each deserves an audience. Netflix rating 5/5.

PLAINSONG- by kent haruf

This is one of those books that sneaks up on you. The story of several different characters seems to lack the suspense/climax/drama/high stakes that appear to make most books appealing. However, I found myself drawn to the simplicity of Plainsong. Placed in the small town of Holt, Colorado, each chapter details the parallel lives of one of several characters; Victoria Roubideaux- a pregnant 17 year old, Guthrie- a teacher and father who's recently separated, Ike and Bobby- his 9 and 10 year old sons, Raymond and Harold McPheron- two old farmers, and Maggie Jones- the woman who causes all of their lives to intersect. The crisp descriptive and delicate interweaving had me flipping pages to learn more about the characters I could almost call friends.
Netflix rating?4.5/5 stars.

Cane River

One of my most favorite books of all time is The Living by Annie Dillard , a novel chronicling several generations of settlers on the Washington coast in the late 19th century. Cane River by Lalita Tademy reminded me of The Living. Cane River is based on the author's own family history in Cane River, Louisiana. She researched her family ancestry and fictionalized three generations of women-- all born slaves.

I was surprised that slavery was not just "black and white"-- there were freed colored people (presumably blacks, native Americans and those of mixed background) who themselves were sometimes slave owners. And, it was not uncommon for white men to have families with slaves-- sometimes freeing the children or giving them land and other benefits. Surprisingly, this became less acceptable over time, so that the most recent generation (early to mid 20th century), represented by Emily (despite having the most "white" blood in her), bore the brunt of what we recognize as modern racism.

Elisabeth, her daughter Suzette, her daughter Philomene and finally, her daughter Emily are all focused that family is what matters most. They each learn early on that although their white masters might be "generous" to them, they are slaves and their loyalty must ultimately be to each other. They keep each other close and work to ensure that future generations will be better off (ie, owning land, being able to read, and even passing for white).

Like Almodovar's movie Volver, the women in Cane River run the show; men are not incidental, but they are used and manipulated to further advance the families of the women of Cane River. At one point, a census taker comes and records all the generations of women living in Suzette's home-- not a man living among them.

This very nearly was an uplifting book, but for where the book dropped off, in the late 1930's. We know that times would only become more difficult for African Americans, but given the author's own experience and success, we know these generations of women accomplished their goals.

Netflix rating: 4/5 stars.

VERONIKA DECIDES TO DIE- by paulo coelho

I polished off this quick read in two days on the beach. I initially picked it up as one of the "buy two, get one free" deal at Barnes and Noble, mainly because I liked Coelho's other book, "The Alchemist." This book takes place over approximately one week, and begins with the main character, Veronika, attempting suicide. Her reasons aren't extraordinary; she's not seriously depressed (although some would argue that she must be in order to try to kill herself), she hasn't had any recent crises, she's young, attractive, employed, sociable. She simply feels that her life has become stagnant, and suicide is her solution. She takes four packs of sleeping pills, one by one, and drifts into a coma from which she awakens days later to find that she's not dead, but in a mental hospital. She's told by the head physician that her heart was severely damaged while she was in the coma, and that she has less than a week to live. Despite being given medicine to "prolong" her life, she experiences several attacks and symptoms of heart failure during the ensuing days. The book shows how this information affects not only Veronika, but several of the other patients as well, and clarifies the differences in the realities of the "sane" and those of the "insane." I appreciated the progression of events and character development as each person evolved, and found the story not depressing, but uplifting.
Parts of this book were inspired by actual events in Coelho's life. He was in a mental hospital three times in the sixties, and while he never wrote directly about them, this was his way of incorporating his experiences into a book.
Netflix rating? 4/5 stars.

THE PAINTED VEIL- by w.somerset maugham

Andrea beat me to the review for this book, our bookclub pick for june. I finished it a week ago while on vacation, and also managed to see the film version which my parents had received from netflix, and brought along in case we had some free time. I agree with most of Andrea's assessment. None of the characters received any of my sympathy, nor did I feel a connection to them (something that's usually necessary for me to enjoy a book). Kitty came close in her time at an orphanage in the cholera epidemic. After her initial disgust towards the "yellow-skinned" children, she appeared to warm to them which gave me hope that her character would grow, learn, mature, etc, but that wasn't the case. Walter was equally flawed. He entered into a marriage with a woman he was desperately in love with, but whom he knew didn't love him. He knew she was trivial, superficial, and bored by him- things that should make him predict her affair- and yet he responded to it by bringing her to a place where he thought she'd die. Normally these circumstances would require me to dislike a book, but not in this case. The flaws of the characters, and my universal dislike of them all allowed me to enjoy the story that was being told, rather than focusing solely on the individuals.
Netflix rating? 3.5/5 stars.

The Year of Magical Thinking and Sophie's Choice

I am a terrible procrastinator and have always been. I distinctly remember my dad taking me to the public library the day before my 5th grade report on India was due, and neglected to send back my housing request form before the start of college, so that I was one of a group of students who had to live in a hotel for the first semester. Before my friend Jane left for the Peace Corps-- a year and a half ago-- she let me take her library of books, and while it was a big pile, I had visions of being able to finish them all before her return. At this point, I've read about two, one of which, Sophie's Choice, by William Styron, I just finished.

Besides being a Jane Book, my other reason for chosing this book was that Joan Didion referenced it in The Year of Magical Thinking. I generally demur from books (and movies) that are surefire tearjerkers, but I had heard such wonderful things about The Year of Magical Thinking that I reserved it at the library. And then forgot about it until an email arrived saying it was ready to pick up. I decided to just get it over with, even if it was depressing, but through reading it, came to identify and empathize with Ms. Didion. Throughout the year following the death of her husband and multiple hospitalizations of her daughter, she references many current days with the same day the year prior-- for example, while covering the Democratic National Convention in Boston, realizes it is her daughter's wedding anniversary, and recalls her, her husband's and her daughter's activities on that date...so different from her current, solitary experience, that she cannot bear to continue her Convention coverage. This intimate confession is one of many similar she makes throughout, and made me smile, not because of any innate humor, but because I could see myself doing the same thing. She recounts a trip to the grocery store she made on the day her daughter was hospitalized, and the receipt lists a handful of modest and meaningless items bought in the face of the profound. I can go through my emails I sent on September 11, 2001, well after I knew about the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, and see that I signed up for a Friendster account, of all things.

Ms. Didion's husband had been re-reading Sophie's Choice around the time of his death, and in that book, the narrator/participant, Stingo, ministers his own Magical Thinking. Stingo goes to post WWII New York, from the South, and meets Sophie, an Auschwitz survivor, and her lover, Nathan, an American Jew. Stingo is naive both by age (an admitted 10 years younger, at 22, than Sophie) and experience (a virgin, not particularly well traveled or knowledegable about non-Southerners).

Stingo interjects Sophie's confessorial backstory (the fate of her anti-semitic father and husband, her and her children's own fate within the concentration camp), as well as her current story (arriving in America to meet her manic depressive soul mate, Nathan), with his own, if not mundane, then innocent, trials and tribulations. Accidents and mores of the era are reported on, and backlashed against with the same urgency and weight as Sophie's own drama. For each carefree, but frustratingly (for Stingo) puritanical girl he meets, we hear Sophie's own stories of lovers chosen by literally, life and death situations. Stingo builds up a personal crisis, only to have it comically contrasted to Sophie's mind and life numbing traumas-- does his father's altercation with a cab driver and subsequent (accidental) black eye really compare to the abuse Sophie suffers at the hands of Nathan?

Stingo does, however, appreciate the gravity of Sophie's experience to his own; on the day she arrived at Auschwitz, he recalls he was eating bananas to "make weight" for recruitment into the armed forces. And ultimately, Stingo too harbors a secret-- his family's slave holding past has allowed him the funds to spend a summer writing, without working a 9-5 office job. While wet behind the ears as the main narrative takes place, the mature narrator Stingo alludes that the events of that summer not only allowed him to tackle the bulk of the book he wrote, but allowed him to part with his own past and find his own place in history.

Netflix stars-- 5 out of 5 for both books. Next up, a continuation on the same thread... Cane River by Lalita Tademy, chronicling generations of slaves in Louisiana. But first, the dishes and laundry I've put off while reading...

The Painted Veil

Despite having wanting to see the movie version of this book for months, I really had little idea what the story was about. This was a book club pick, so is not on my list of bookshelf books, although it's there now, since I actually had to buy it, the waiting list at the library was too long.

The Painted Veil by W. Somerset Maugham would be a comedy of manners, except it is no comedy. In fact, everything that can go wrong, does. Kitty fails to make a good marriage, so marries a suitor who will marry her before her sister's marriage. She takes a lover, who ultimately does not stand up for her and her husband, as payback, takes her to the heart of a cholera epidemic in a Chinese village. Death and destruction abound, but while the book was easy to read (at just 250 pages, it is a two night read), I felt nothing for any of the characters and regarded them all as superficial people. And perhaps that was the intent. The book takes place at the height of British colonialism, and through one of the characters, Maugham makes a point of declaring that the British can live anywhere, and have no connection to their homeland. Each of the characters looks out for his or her own person, without regard for others and their physical location-- whether England, Hong Kong, a small village or the Bahamas, the location is incidental and once the "job is done" the location and people connected with it are useless.

I guess I was hoping for a little more romance, but when I look deeper, the book could be transposed to many situations in present day.

Netflix rating: 3 out of 5 stars.