The Cue Card

Hello. Just a quick post as we are still visiting family in Southern California and there’s no time to be on the computer or blog … in this land of milk and honey. I hope everyone had a lovely holiday break and are continuing their festivities with a very happy New Year’s.

Last week I finished F.Scott Fitzgerald’s 1934 novel “Tender Is the Night,” which I was reading with Ti over at Book Chatter. Thanks Ti, I’m glad to make it through this famous book, which was Fitzgerald’s last completed novel and apparently his most autobiographical. Interestingly, Fitzgerald considered the novel to be his greatest work. As he wrote to a friend: “If you liked The Great Gatsby, for God’s sake read this. Gatsby was a tour de force but this is a confession of faith.”

For those unfamiliar with it, “Tender Is the Night” tells the story of a glamorous American couple living at a villa in the French Riviera in the late 1920s — Dick and Nicole Diver whose marriage over time hits the rocks. Dick is this brilliant guy, a promising psychiatrist who makes the fatal choice of marrying one of his patients; Nicole is beautiful and wealthy but also mentally unstable. She’s left a treatment facility but still has episodes, and Dick is floundering with work and feels trapped by Nicole’s wealth into a lifestyle that is not his own. Into this comes the hot young actress Rosemary Hoyt who is enamored by Dick and whom he can’t resist. Oh sorry day! What once seemed so idyllic and glamorous — Dick and Nicole’s life together (along with their two kids) — turns out to be a recipe for demise.

I wanted to like “Tender Is the Night” as much as Fitzgerald’s novel “The Great Gatsby,” but alas, I struggled through parts of it and found it uneven and episodic. There were sections that I thought were brilliantly written and other parts that I found quite tedious. I had trouble getting into and sticking with the story, which starts with an array of expatriates staying and partying at a hotel along the beach.

It’s slow-going at first, but luckily “Tender Is the Night” picked up for me half way through and towards the end as I wanted to find out how Dick and Nicole’s lives would play out — if they would they stay together, or if they would go their separate ways — and what would become of the fling with Rosemary. I needed to see if the characters would find happiness so I stuck with it and plunged further on toward its final dark horizon.

It wasn’t exactly easy reading, but I found the novel quite interesting in how it apparently mirrored Fitzgerald’s own life at the time — with his mentally ill wife Zelda, his troubles with alcohol, and the real-life affair he carried on with a teenage actress. The social milieu the novel describes of the times is also rather fascinating. It includes little details about expats and different nationalities, about rich and poor, blacks, gays, women and children — and marriage. You definitely get a glimpse into Fitzgerald’s 1920’s world and what was going through his mind during the last stages of his life — and I, for one, couldn’t pass that up. He’s too intriguing and talented a figure in literary history to miss reading, even if it’s not my favorite work of his — the story of the Divers is illuminating.

Meanwhile, I listened to Garth Stein’s 2014 novel “A Sudden Light” on audiobook this past week and quite enjoyed it. A multi-generational tale set in the Pacific Northwest, it’s about a 14-year-old-boy (Trevor) who comes to unravel the mysteries of his father’s rich timber baron family when he visits their decaying old mansion — Riddell House — for the first time in the summer of 1990. Trevor accompanies his father who’s supposed to resolve a family dispute over what to do with the large Northwest estate.

Part coming of age tale, part historical logging expose, and part mansion-ghost story, this family drama held my interest till the very end. It has a few twists along the way and an ending that crashes with a crescendo. I guess I liked it just as well as Stein’s prior novel “The Art of Racing in the Rain” and found it more intricate and slightly more interesting than the first in its larger scope. Like “Racing in the Rain,” the narration is easy and lured me in. Kudos to Seth Numrich for a terrific job in his narration of the audiobook.


 “A Sudden Light” is one of those novels you can’t say too much about because it will give it away. Suffice it to say, I liked hanging out with the book’s protagonist, Trevor, who’s a bit of a truth and mystery seeker and is as determined as the boy detective in the series Encyclopedia Brown. By the end, he gets to the heart of the mysteries of his timber baron family and what’s behind the selling of the mansion — and it’s not exactly pretty. Stein is an entertaining author, and I look forward to seeing what he writes next.

What about you — have you read “A Sudden Light” or “Tender Is the Night” and if so, what did you think?

Quite a few of the protagonists in the books I’ve read this past year have been pretty lonely characters, such as: the teenage boy in “My Sunshine Away,” the Russian scientist in “Us Conductors,” the English anthropologist in “Euphoria,” the lady investigator in “The Enchanted,” and of course who can forget the sad professor in “Stoner,” among others. Holy smokes, these people linger on the edges of society — trying to make due by their lonesome selves.

Now I have one more to add to the group: Moses Sweetland, the 69-year-old man in Canadian author Michael Crummey’s 2014 novel “Sweetland.” He’s a crotchety codger who lives among an island community off the coast of Newfoundland and refuses to leave the island with everyone else when the government decommissions the place and offers compensation for all to leave. Sweetland’s pressured to take the offer but after an accident occurs he decides not to. Left on the island alone, he struggles to survive and ruminates over his life and past memories of the community, his relatives, and the place he so clearly loves.

Wow “Sweetland” is a slow-burning novel that’s evocative and a bit haunting. It’s about the loss of a way of life and one man’s inability or willingness to go along. Some of the novel’s best parts are the descriptions of his everyday life on the island doing chores and getting by, and his relations with his relatives and others there in the community who eventually leave. I was caught up in Sweetland’s story though it’s rather sad and his struggle to keep on after everyone on the island goes away.

It’s one of those books that moves slowly in places but gets under your skin. It fully engaged me and never seemed dull. Bravo to author Michael Crummey — my new favorite Canadian author? I immediately looked up his bibliography to see what else I need to get my hands on and it appears his 2009 novel “Galore” was highly praised as well. I will put it on my list. Have you read it?

Meanwhile I also finished the audiobook of Montana author Malcolm Brooks’s 2014 debut novel “Painted Horses.” Wow it’s a bit of an epic novel in its scope and storytelling, which I didn’t realize when I first picked it up. Set in the 1950s, it involves two main characters whose paths cross at a Montana canyon slated to be flooded by a proposed dam. Catherine Lemay is a young archaeologist hired to survey the canyon for historical artifacts before the dam project gets the green light; and John H., is a rugged horseman and artist who served in WWII in the last cavalry unit. They come together over secrets in the canyon, but stakes in the community for the dam run high, and the power company and big business stand in their way.

The ending gets a bit crazy but all in all the storytelling is quite good. The story flashes back and forth between the past and present of Catherine’s and John’s different histories and how that shapes them in their view of the canyon. There’s a bit of everything in this novel: drama, romance, cowboys, Native Americans, WWII, art, archaeology, feminism, nature, a vanishing way of life vs. the future and new technology. At times, I thought perhaps the author bit off more than he could chew, but still the novel comes together and holds one’s attention with interesting facets and dilemmas.

I think I was drawn to “Painted Horses” mostly for its premise set in the American West of the 1950s, and for the author’s descriptions of the Montana landscape, animals, and the canyon. He definitely knows the ins and outs of horses — mustangs, mares, stallions — you name it, and I empathized with the characters. I also can’t resist a novel involving archaeology. If you like any of these things, you’ll want to check out this novel.

What about you, have you read the novels “Sweetland” or “Painted Horses,” and if so what did you think? Their book covers look pretty nice, too!

First of all congrats to Andre Alexis who won the Giller Prize, Canada’s top literary award, this week for his novel “Fifteen Dogs,” which is a philosophical story about a group of dogs overnighting at a Toronto vet clinic that are suddenly capable of human intelligence. I heard the author read from his novel at our city’s book festival last month, but I haven’t gotten my hands on a copy of “Fifteen Dogs” just yet. It slightly reminds me of George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” because of the talking animals and the points being made about the human condition, but we will see. Have you read it yet?

Meanwhile, I finished one meaty literary read this week, as well as one light murder-mystery book. So between these two opposites my mind is a bit mush, though they did even each other out pretty well. The heavier read, Anthony Marra’s 2013 novel “A Constellation of Vital Phenomena,” is a book I picked for my book club to discuss in December since it received so many high accolades when it first came out and I’d been meaning to read it for a long time.

Set in Chechnya during its second war with Russia, the novel is about a small group of people struggling to survive in the bleakest of circumstances. One of them is an 8-year-old girl, Havaa, who hides when her father is abducted by Russian soldiers in the middle of the night. Her neighbor, Akhmed, is an incompetent doctor, who takes her to a crumbling, nearly deserted hospital to seek refuge for her. But Sonja, the doctor in charge there, is hesitant to risk harboring the child, even though she knows without it, the child will likely disappear as Sonja’s sister did. Akhmed’s “uncle” is another main character, who writes long histories of the Chechen land, and is conflicted by his once-tortured son, who’s a government informant that rats on people in their village. All of the characters become connected in intense ways as they navigate five days amid the brutal war.

“A Constellation of Vital Phenomena” involves tough material and isn’t an easy read, but for those who stick with it, its rewards are considerable. A few challenging things about the book perhaps are how it alternates chapters in different times and points-of-view, and throws in quite a bit of context and details about Chechnya and the war that one might not otherwise know. A lot of the pages also don’t have any paragraph breaks so the text seems to rattle on at length, adding to its density at times.

And yet, I became very intertwined with the characters and felt the suspense of whether or not they would survive or see their families again. They seemed so real and vivid. Sonja, the top-notch doctor, who returns from abroad to her homeland to try and find her sister, is my favorite of the bunch. She is gritty, brilliant, and sacrifices so much to help others, which is ultimately what I took away from the novel — the main characters’ humanity despite all the hell they go through. As author Anthony Marra told NPR: “It’s a novel about people who are trying to transcend the hardships of their circumstances by saving others.”

“A Constellation of Vital Phenomena” should stimulate a good discussion with my book club as there are quite a few characters in it and it involves such themes as sacrifice, betrayal, and forgiveness. In terms of the war in Chechnya, the book doesn’t seem to be on one side or the other, but is more about the ordinary people who get caught up in the war’s crosshairs. I found the novel to be pretty eye-opening about the Chechen country and war, which I only vaguely remember from news stories back then. The author obviously did a lot of research and visited the area, which shows. The novel is definitely a moving tribute to the people there who went through such things.

Meanwhile, the lighter book I finished this week was an audiobook called “The Last September” by Nina de Gramont. It’s a love story, murder-mystery type book that is set mainly in Cape Cod, Mass. At the book’s beginning, the narrator, a girl named Brett, whose marriage is on the rocks, finds her husband, Charlie, murdered. The story then goes back in time to how Brett met Charlie through his younger brother Eli, who Brett was good friends with, and tells of Brett’s long relations with the brothers — Charlie, a popular ladies man, and Eli, who becomes mentally unstable. Brett eventually snags Charlie to be her husband but first breaks off an engagement to Ladd, a well-off guy who grew up in the same cove as the brothers.

“The Last September” takes quite a circuitous route to find out who killed Charlie, and I was reminded in its suspenseful parts of Gillian Flynn’s novel “Gone Girl.” It kept my attention for the most part, but overall “The Last September” seemed too much like chick-lit to me, and it’s not a genre I typically read. I would recommend it for chick-lit murder-mystery readers. I thought it was well done for that genre — maybe a bit unrealistic in places — but just not a book in my favorite wheelhouse. Do I need to explain myself further, or have I opened a can of worms with my assessment?

What about you — have you read “A Constellation of Vital Phenomenon” or “The Last September” and if so, what did you think?

I don’t recall when I first learned about the Donner Party — those ill-fated pioneers who set out from Illinois in covered wagons for California in 1846, only to become snowbound in the Sierra Nevada Mountains without adequate provisions. It could have been in junior high history class, or I could have read about the group on my own. Perhaps the Donners were a prerequisite for growing up in California. You didn’t exactly know where you learned about them, you just sort of knew. And theirs was a story you didn’t really forget.

Over the decades, so many books have been written about the Donner Party, both nonfiction and fiction alike — it’s definitely been the Titanic of pioneer stories. Quite a few years ago, I read James D. Houston’s novel “Snow Mountain Passage,” which enlivened aspects of the Donners’ story for me but perhaps didn’t give me the complete picture. Thus, when I was recently offered an opportunity to review Daniel James Brown’s nonfiction book “The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Saga of the Donner Party,” I pretty much jumped at the chance.

For one thing, I’ve always been keen on reading about epic, real-life survival tales. Thanks to books, I’ve been to the Antarctic with Shackleton a number of times; ditto the South Pole with Roald Amundsen and Robert Falcon Scott; I’ve been on the Titanic trying to figure out exactly what happened and when; I’ve been “Into the Wild” and “Into Thin Air”; and somewhere in my stack of books to read, I’m going to go underground with the 33 Chilean miners. So it wasn’t a stretch that I would also want to climb aboard the most infamous pioneers’ wagon train to figure out exactly what went so horribly wrong. Sure they were to cross sixteen hundred miles through rough foreign territory with old weapons and equipment to move to a place they’d only recently heard about, but they were among a large wagon train and they were well stocked for the five or six month journey. Everything seemed to be going according to plan, or was it?

The book “The Indifferent Stars Above” also appealed to me because like many others, I didn’t realize that Daniel James Brown — the same author of the bestselling “The Boys in the Boat” — had written about the Donner Party before the boat book. Perhaps who better to reawaken the Donners’ daunting journey. Renown for his narrative nonfiction style, I figured Brown would be a perfect match for capturing what the pioneers went through in a well-researched, page-turning way, and as I assumed, the book did not disappoint.

I was lured into “The Indifferent Stars Above” pretty much from the start. The book focuses on the Graves family, particularly Sarah Graves, the 21-year-old, eldest daughter of Elizabeth and Franklin Graves whose eight other young children were traveling with them as well. Sarah, pictured at left, had just become married when they had set off on their journey and she had her new husband by her side. By all accounts, Sarah and the Graves family were in high spirits as they stopped in Missouri for supplies and joined a much larger wagon train headed west, led by the Donner and Reed parties.

It wasn’t long before I latched on to Sarah’s wagon as the book traces the journey with her family and others across the Plains, through the Nevada desert, and into the mountains. Like her parents, Sarah seemed well liked and hardy, devoted to helping her younger siblings along the way. On the whole, I was pretty amazed by all the young children and babies the pioneers were traveling with on foot and in their wagons. Good grief, the parents didn’t seem to think twice about moving their young brood so far from home despite the harsh conditions.

“The Indifferent Stars Above” does well in giving significant insight into the social and historical context of the times. It talks about the illnesses of the day, the threat they feared from Indians, how war in California was going on with Mexico, and how the pioneers lived without much in the way of toothbrushes (they hadn’t been invented yet), baths, or laundry, while battling such pests as lice, bedbugs, and fleas. The pioneers seemed a much tougher group than we are today, and I wouldn’t have worried about them so much if I hadn’t already known of their journey’s tragic outcome.

But as the book explores, multiple factors doomed the Donner wagon train. They took an untested route and arrived at the Sierra Nevada Mountains exhausted and too late in the season. Like “Into Thin Air,” they were too late to their destination, and a blizzard had already begun to blow. Oh how I wish in my reading, I could have changed their outcome! Their story was like a darkening vortex that I knew I’d have to go through. Sarah Graves and her family became stuck with the other families, snowbound and hungry, at the base of a mountain lake, well below the pass they needed to get over to get into California. Most of them tried to survive by staying in make-shift cabins at the lake, while others went for help. But eventually only half of the 87 pioneers in their wagon train would survive.

Sarah Graves was one of 15 snowshoers who scaled the snowy pass to go for help. They were trying to get to an outpost across the mountains that was more than 60 miles away, but they didn’t even have a compass. (I’m reminded a bit of Shackleton’s epic escape in the Antarctic some 70 years later.) “The Indifferent Stars Above” details the snowshoers’ harrowing journey through blizzard conditions as well as those who stayed behind at the lake camp, snowbound for four months. The story includes some of the worst suffering from starvation and hypothermia that I’ve ever read. It’s heart-wrenching agony, and yet all I could do was read on and hope the snow would abate for once and that those who went for help would make it through.

It’s a survival tale that’s undoubtedly hair-raising, and Brown’s narrative of it is quite riveting. I felt like I was on the mountain, trying the best I could to help them escape. Along the way, the book also includes some insightful scientific research from today about hypothermia, snow blindness, and caloric intake and what the pioneers likely faced both physically and psychologically. It also talks about the high snow levels from the winter of 1846-1847, a winter that was also unkind to the men of British explorer Sir John Franklin’s expedition who were attempting to find a Northwest Passage.

Much has been written about the Donner Party and the cannibalism that a number of the pioneers resorted to for survival after others had passed away. In history books, the group is often seen not as heroic but as a group to be disdained or shunned completely. Not many want to think about the Donner Party for that reason. While Brown’s book “The Indifferent Stars Above” doesn’t ignore their cannibalism, it attempts to focus the saga more on it as a survival story since half of the pioneers got out alive. The book does include quite a bit of the gory details, and a few times, I felt like I was going to be sick. You definitely get the full picture of their struggles, along with the cannibalism, and yet Brown’s narrative gives the pioneers such as Sarah Graves a humanity perhaps they aren’t often credited with.

I have to praise the author and his book “The Indifferent Stars Above” for opening my eyes a bit and not demonizing the families who were there. Sarah Graves seemed an ordinary girl for her times, and yet was able to pull off an extraordinary feat, one that others died trying. You’ll want to stick around at the end to hear what became of her life in California and others long after that gruesome winter in 1846-47.

Thanks to Trish Collins at TLC Book Tours and William Morrow Paperbacks for providing me with a copy of the book to review.

What about you — have you read about the Donner Party before — or are you interested in “The Indifferent Stars Above”?