The Tiger's Wife: A Novel

I didn't set out to read a book about the death of a grandparent so soon after my own grandma passed away, but Tea Obreht's debut novel piqued my interest. The Tiger's Wife is equal parts fable, memory and nostalgia.
Natalia is a young doctor in her imaginary Balkan country, war torn and ravaged. On a mission to "the other side" she learns of her grandfather's passing and spends the next few days remembering him while she attempts to find the belongings he had on him when he died, including a copy of The Jungle Book Natalia remembers well. Natalia carries her memories of her grandfather, but also two stories her grandfather told her: one, the story of the Deathless Man and two, the story of the Tiger's Wife. Both recall the best writers of magical realism.
Natalia struggles with fulfilling her professional role and being with her grandmother to mourn. I was able to empathize; contemporary society doesn't allow time for grieving, or death. But this book reminded me that I can take my time, that the memories I have of my grandma will stay with me, and I can recall them at will, just as Natalia did.
The Tiger's Wife is remarkable in part because of Obreht's young age and for that I'm thankful. I look forward to many more novels from her.
4/5 netflix stars

Enough About Love

Enough About Love by Herve le Tellier is just longer than a novella; a few character sketches. Set in contemporay France, it tells the story of two couples, upper middle class, doctors, writers, a lawyer, with children. The women each meet someone else and either leave, or contemplate leaving their families. Le Tellier composes the chapters from individual and couple standpoints and is non-judgemental, in the way only the French can be when it comes to affairs. A book like this can easily been read as a film and I kept imagining Juliette Binoche as the lawyer.

This was a subtle, yet easy read, but for me, ultimately, unremarkable. I'd be suprised if I remember it in a year. 3/5 netflix stars.

Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead

In elementary school we participated in BookIt, which was a program where we set a goal of a number of books to read and when we reached that goal we'd get a coupon for a personal pan pizza from Pizza Hut. It never took much for me to be motivated to read, but getting that pizza was pretty special. A few weeks ago I got an email from the library that four books I had requested were ready to pick up. Panic! How would I read so many books? Obviously I need to motivate myself with pizza, so from here on out, it's a book a week!

Fortunately Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead by Sara Gran was both short and a mystery-- a perfect quick read. Claire is hired to investigate the disappearance of man's uncle in Post-Katrina New Orleans. Her detection methods are based on her mentor, Constance, as well as a book by Silette called Detection. Her methods also include copious amounts of booze and prescription and non-prescription drugs. Besides her actual case, several other "mysteries" are alluded to, making a strong case for future books.

New Orleans is portrayed as fairly post-apocolyptic in this book, not so different from Zeitoun. It's the perfect setting for crime noir and Gran's writing is spot on. A favorite quote, that represents a colleague, but could refer to many inhabitants of New Orleans: "Some people, I saw, had drowned right away. And some people were drowning in slow motion, drowning a lit bit at a time, and would be drowning for years. And some people, like Mick, had always been drowning. They just hadn't known what to call it until now. "

4/5 Netflix stars (and one book closer to my pizza).

Swamplandia!

Summer's here, which means vacation time. So I'm taking a vacation from reading books based in the midwest and heading straight to Florida. Swamplandia! by Karen Russell is everything its title implies. Like the Binewski family in Katherine Dunn's Geek Love, the Bigtree "tribe" live on the edge of society and earn a living being themselves. They live on one of Florida's 10,000 islands and runs a tourist show of alligator wrestling. Aside from the thousands of "mainlander" tourists, the kids only interact with each other and are blissfully unaware of life on the mainland. Kiwi is the oldest and has dreams of attending Harvard. Dreamy Ossie communes with and runs away with a ghost, leaving the youngest, Ava, to fend for herself.

Russell's Florida swamplands have Weed Witches instead of bagladies, long abandoned dredgeboats are homes to marriage inclined ghosts from the 1930s and dank canals lead to the Underworld. Each of the children live on the brink of reality and they compellingly pull us along a journey of questionable danger. Susan Orlean nearly forgets her journalistic bias in favor of seeing a rare orchid in The Orchid Thief, so why wouldn't the reader think the Bird Man a contemporary Charon?

Ms. Russell's novel is a fascinating read-- equally creepy, mysterious and funny (Kiwi's jobs and interactions with fellow "new hires" in competitor World of Darkness are worth the cover price) and Ava's love for her family is priceless. 5/5 netflix stars.

The Song of the Lark

I continued my revisit of Willa Cather with The Song of the Lark, a book I hadn't read previously in high school, but which kind of reminded me of me in high school. Thea is talented adolescent musician living in small town Moonstone, CO. Many of the adults in her life realize her talent could take her beyond the small town and Thea ultimately realizes this too. Like Thea, I knew college would be an opportunity for me to leave Kansas and experience life in a bigger city than Wichita.

Thea and her family all make sacrifices so she can study piano and voice in Chicago. Cather uses her descriptive writing style to highlight Thea's training. Whereas I love her descriptions of life in the west and midwest, her accounts of lessons and operas were less interesting to me. Thea had "an attitude" that in a woman today would be considered bitchy-- I had to catch and remind myself that her journey was unusual for a woman of her day and her obstacles numerous.

This was just not my favorite Cather book, although she still tackles contemporary themes of racism against immigrants and women working and taking non-traditional life routes (Thea rejects marriage in favor of career). 3 out of 5 stars.

Great House

The History of Love by Nicole Krauss was not my favorite so I was pleasantly surprised by how moving her third novel, Great House, was.  In Great House, a large desk is the centerpiece both of the houses it occupies and the lives it touches. As an adult, I haven't had any furniture I care about-- I could get rid of it all and wouldn't miss it. But this desk represented a nostalgia for all who posessed it: nostalgia for a pre-Holocaust home in Budpest, nostalgia for a poet disappeared under Pinochet, the hope of another book written at it. Krauss weaves together disparate lives in different parts of the world, giving the book a kind of mystery as I kept reading to see how they would all connect together.

As in The History of Love, Krauss uses a bit of dialogue tic (which is what I disliked) but it is minor and I think her overall writing is improved. I look forward to her next books.

5 out of 5 netflix stars

My Antonia and The Bean Trees

The midwest might be considered the breadbasket of America, but my sister and I knew midwestern foods from the following categories: vegetables were from a can, and usually casseroled with the help of cream of mushroom soup. Salad would be based on jello not lettuce, and would be sprinkled throughout with marshmallows or mandarin oranges, not peppers or croutons.  By late January the snow piles had reached 5 feet and taller and I had a nostalgic hunger for not just banana pudding and Old El Paso tacos, but tales of survival in the midwest when survival meant more than shoveling the front sidewalk.

I'd read My Antonia by Willa Cather in high school and remembered loving it, although the story had faded in my memory.  In the last quarter of the 19th century Antonia arrived in Nebraska farmland with her family from Bohemia. Not farmers by trade, they struggled through the first winter, with Antonia easily doing the farm work of any boy her age and aided in English lessons by Virginia transplant Jim, a boy a few years her junior.

A century later Taylor was making her own journey out west in Barbara Kingsolver's The Bean Trees.  For Taylor, survival meant escaping her native Kentucky without getting pregnant, but when her car breaks down in Oklahoma and she's given a catatonic little girl, she names her Turtle and takes her with her to her ultimate stopping point of Tuscon, acknowledging the irony.

Jim is the narrator in My Antonia, but the women are it's heroines. He admires their strength and beauty-- these are women who have to work to earn a living. For some that means prospecting for gold, opening a successful dress shop or raising a family to work the farm. He defends them the anti-immigrant bias of the day and even years later when he's a successful Harvard trained attorney, is humbled by their success.

To rescue herself, Taylor jumps into motherhood, rescuing Turtle, but also rescues Estevan and Esperanza, immigrant refugees from Latin America and Lou Ann, a woman who becomes her roommate and confidante and needs Taylor as much as Taylor needs her.

Five stars for both books, which satiated my hunger for the midwest while I was holed away in a terrible New England winter...even if I did have to indulge in some 7 layer dip and Snickers salad.