The Cue Card

Last weekend, the Hub and I drove to Glacier National Park in Montana, staying for a few days to celebrate our anniversary. It’s a beautiful place where we love to bicycle and hike. The Going-to-the-Sun Road, which winds through Glacier Park for about 52 miles, is an awesome journey that makes its way over the Continental Divide at Logan Pass at 6,646 feet.

Near the top, the road narrows and tightly clings to the mountainside while taking you around some high tight turns. It’s a ride in places that’s not exactly for the faint of heart (like me). If you’ve ever seen the movie “The Shining,” the opening scenes and aerial shots are of this epic road, which sets the movie’s beginning perfectly, both for being isolated and a little ominous.

Luckily our trip didn’t include any spooky moments like those in “The Shining.” I did not run into Danny talking about “redrum” or see any twins in the corridors of our lodge. Thank goodness. Instead check out the photo at left of Lake McDonald, which is serene and beautiful and along which we lodged and spent most of our time. Just don’t fall in. I’m sure it’d be rather chilly.

While there, I read Celeste Ng’s 2014 highly acclaimed debut novel “Everything I Never Told You,” which I picked for my book club to read and discuss after the novel was selected on many best-of lists last year. Perhaps I’m one of the last bloggers to read this quite sad but notable book? Luckily it generated a good discussion last night at book club. I think it’s because it delves into various issues that are still relevant today and consists of some characters and drama that can be argued over for quite a good long gathering.

It’s not giving anything away to say “Everything I Never Told You” is about a teenage girl (Lydia) who goes missing and is found drown in the local lake. That’s at the beginning of the book. The rest of it goes back in time, gradually laying out how she got there and why she died.

Set in a small Ohio town in the 1970s, the story explores Lydia’s close ties within her Chinese-American family who all feel like outsiders in their Midwest community. It delves into her parents’ backgrounds (her mother’s unachieved dreams of becoming a doctor, her dad’s humble and unpopular youth as a son of immigrant workers) and the views of her older brother and younger sister who are often ignored. In her parents’ eyes, Lydia is the favorite child who gets all the attention and is expected to achieve the unfulfilled dreams that they did not.

It’s an intense little book (292 pages) of an unraveling family and is a quick read. The author seems a natural, getting into the heads and backgrounds of all, while the pages flip by easily. It’s a sad and tragic story. Everyone in the family fails to communicate truthfully with one another, keeping secrets that ultimately have such regrettable consequences. I liked the many issues that this book touches upon which felt real to me, namely: the pressures kids and parents put each other through; women’s roles in society and unfulfilled dreams; being an outsider and feelings of inadequacy for those of mixed-race ethnicities — and on the flip side of that — the whole stifling, homogenized world of 1970s small-town America is effectively displayed in the book.

It’s agonizing at times how aggravating the characters can be and how suffocating the setting is. If only they would do this and this and this! — you think. But no, they don’t. Still you feel compelled by where their lives have taken them. You sympathize. It’s impossible not to. Despite whatever your minor quibbles, you must hear this novel out. For a slim debut, I felt it packed a lot of issues in. I’ll definitely be looking for whatever novel author Celeste Ng puts out next.

What about you have you read “Everything I Never Told You,” and if so what did you think?

Wow the trailer to “The Martian” came out this week and Matt Damon is Mark Watney! For those who read Andy Weir’s 2014 bestselling book, you know what I’m talking about … The red planet. The astronaut left behind. The rescue plans he comes up with. With Ridley Scott directing, the movie adaptation, coming out at Thanksgiving time, is going to rock! I reviewed the novel “The Martian” in April 2014 and was sure it’d make a heck of a movie. I just didn’t realize how quickly it would be made. Check out the preview

and let me know what you think.

Also this past week, congrats to Scottish author Ali Smith for winning the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction for her 2014 novel “How to Be Both,” which the New York Times describes as “an innovatively structured novel about a young girl in modern-day England and a painter in Renaissance Italy.” I’ve heard mixed things about the book, which apparently is poetic and challenging and not for everyone. Author Sarah Waters was the odds-on favorite to win the prize for her bestselling novel “The Paying Guests,” but alas didn’t win it, which surprised me.

Also congrats to Jack Livings for winning the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction for “The Dog,” a collection of short stories set in China. New York Times writer Michiko Kakutani says the collection opens a “prismatic window on China, showing us how part of the country is rushing to embrace the 21st century, even as its history continues to exert a magnetic hold over people’s thinking and expectations.” Hmm. I haven’t heard if many bloggers have read this collection yet, but it sounds like one to behold.

Meanwhile though it seems I’ve been away from the blog for a while, it’s just that summer has become busy and I was up to my eyelids in Anthony Doerr’s 2014 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel set during World War II “All the Light We Cannot See.” Need I say more? It’s a long war. Awful. I was on the sixth floor of the house in Saint-Malo, France, hiding with blind 14-year-old girl Marie-Laure and hoping she was going to make it. She was at her reclusive uncle’s house so close to the sea, where she liked to visit a nearby grotto that had barnacles and snails on its walls, which I could see blind Marie running her hands over. I was also imagining 16-year-old orphan, German soldier Werner in the Opel truck driving across the Occupied countryside tracking the resistance through his radio receiver. But the toll the results take on him, sets him off on a different course. I knew these two protagonists’ paths would cross towards the end, but heck what would happen to them then?

I had to hurry to find out, but it took awhile to get there. Anthony Doerr’s book is quite an epic read (530 pages) that goes back and forth in time and alternates Marie-Laure’s story with that of Werner’s into short chapters. There’s also a storyline about a large valuable diamond — apparently cursed — that Marie finds from her father after he is arrested and a Nazi who is pursuing the gem.

I liked the book quite a bit (though maybe didn’t love, love, it) and found it vivid and visual of the historical time period. It’s excellently weaved together with some elegant prose. I felt for the characters and finished the book as if I had endured the war too — emaciated, sleepless, and a mess from death, bombs, and trying to avoid Nazi capture. I particularly liked the radio aspects of the story — how radio transmitters were used by both sides — and how Werner’s passion for radios and science and Marie’s passion for Jules Verne’s “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea” eventually brings them together. It’s wonderfully imagined. I liked how it transported me to these young characters lives behind enemy lines. Although I think it could have been cut 80+ pages shorter and put into longer chapters. I’m still wondering too about the ending — was it enough? It feels quite fleeting and maybe not what you want but perhaps that’s exactly the way pivotal things in life go sometimes.

What about you have you read “All the Light We Cannot See,” and if so what did you think?

I didn’t realize I had been sucked into Lily King’s 2014 novel “Euphoria” until the end of the book — and then I was a sad wreck for the characters, as if it were a true story and I had lost touch with people I had known quite well.

Interestingly, author Lily King bases the characters on a brief time out of American anthropologist Margaret Mead’s real life story. It was a period of five months in 1933 when Mead and her second husband took a field trip to study the native people along the Sepik River, in New Guinea. There, they collaborated with the man who would become Mead’s third husband, the English anthropologist Gregory Bateson. See the photo of the three of them below, as they were in 1933.

King takes this situation and setting and then develops a unique story for three anthropologists that is all their own. In the book, it’s Fen and Nell that are married, and Englishman Andrew Bankson who meets them while researching a tribe alone in New Guinea in 1933. Much of the novel delves into the three anthropologists hard at work, and their professional ambitions, studying the human behavior of the river tribes in the jungle. To me it was helpful to have an interest in anthropology to be intrigued with the book as it spends considerable time on the tribes’ behavior.

At the same time the story is also about the love triangle that develops between anthropologists Nell, Fen, and Bankson, and this undoubtedly is the most alluring part of the story. It’s cleverly done: how they’re exploring human behavior while dancing around their own. It’s raw and primitive in the field, and at times, sickness, remoteness, and ambition tightly bring together the three anthropologists and at other times cloud their judgements.

The novel’s well researched and vividly conjures up the settlements, the insects, the dirt, the native peoples, the scientists’ dress and equipment in 1933. The imagery is so visceral it’s as if you’re with them amid the jungle and can breathe the dense humid air.

It’s lonely Bankson, too, that makes the story come to life. A bright, sympathetic soul, he narrates the book mainly — combined with some field notes from Nell — and inevitably draws you into their world one step at a time. You feel him falling for Nell from the day he meets her. But she’s with Fen, who he’s also close to, and their lives and work are complicated. It’s a threesome that works, but also doesn’t. Three makes a crowd so they say.

I don’t think I foresaw the exact ending of the novel. Would Bankson and Nell wind up together, Fen and Nell break apart, or any of them make their mark from their research on the tribes once they returned to civilization? I went down their path, hoping for the best for each, but was quite saddened by the end, which is all I can say about it.

“Euphoria” is a vivid, real-feeling story that moves along faster toward the end. Its denouement will definitely stay with me for a long while. No wonder the New York Times chose it as one of the 10 best books of 2014. The novel takes a historical setting but then creatively flies off in an another direction, all the while touching on some of the drives and desires of the human experience. See Lily King’s illuminating essay on how she came up with the story here.

How about you have you read “Euphoria” and if so what did you think? And by the way, what are you up to this Memorial Day weekend?!

Spring continues to unfold here. More trees are in bloom and I’ll be planting the annual geraniums and other flowers soon. Meanwhile the hub and I are training on the side for a couple of upcoming bike ride events that we optimistically signed up for. Hopefully they won’t kill us. So we are bicycling most weekends over hill and dale. It’s nice but also a bit exhausting.

See my chariot at left. Our first event takes place in the mountains next weekend so I’ll try to take some good photos to post. Meanwhile below is a review of the book I finished this week.

I don’t think I knew exactly what I was getting into when I picked up Kamila Shamsie’s 2014 novel “A God in Every Stone.” I got it at the library after it was shortlisted for the Baileys Prize for Women’s Fiction and the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, both of which will announce their winners in early June.

I thought “A God in Every Stone” would be a bit of a love story about a couple of archaeologists from different backgrounds, searching ancient ruins, during tempestuous historical times. Maybe I thought it’d be a bit like Lily King’s 2014 novel “Euphoria.” Sure the novel starts out like that but then it focuses more on the struggle for Indian independence, spanning World War I to the waning days of the British Empire.

In the novel, Vivian Rose is a young British woman who goes to Turkey in 1914 on an archaeological dig and ends up falling for an older Turkish archaeologist who’s searching for a silver circlet from the early days of the Persian Empire. All seems good and on track, but then World War I intervenes and she loses touch with her love. She spends most of the war as a nurse, witnessing horrific casualties.

Years later she travels to the Peshawar Valley (part of India then), continuing the quest for the mysterious silver circlet. She meets two brothers there, one a Pashtun soldier who fought for Britain in WWI, losing an eye, and a much younger boy who becomes her pupil and many years later an archaeologist who takes up her search for the silver circlet. The older brother gets caught up in India’s independence movement and the younger one eventually does at the book’s end when a massacre in 1930 by the British Army of nonviolent protestors brings things to a brutal head.

“A God in Every Stone” is a novel with a wide scope, a sweeping history, and it encompasses ideas about Indian independence, ethnic differences, the suffragist movement, and the Armenian genocide among other things. I found it best in its vivid atmosphere of the times and place, and many of its eloquent passages. No wonder author Kamila Shamsie was included on the Granta list in 2013 as one of Britain’s 20 best young writers today. Interestingly, she grew up in Karachi, Pakistan, and just recently became a British citizen, who now resides in London.

The troubles I had with the novel were that I was sometimes confused by the foreign names and geography of where they were, and a bit of the history and circumstances. Happenings were assumed perhaps and not explained at times. Luckily I finally found a map at the back of the book, which would’ve helped earlier if I’d seen it at the front of the book. Also I seemed to get into the characters, only to have their personal stories dropped later. Vivian Rose and the brothers were intriguing but then the closeness to them and their perspectives were lost along the way. So unfortunately I had to concentrate pretty diligently to finish the book. It wasn’t an easy read. It’s sweeping and at times disjointed. I’m glad I read it though. It gave me more perspective on a region I don’t know enough about and a feel for the turbulent days under colonialism.

How about you — have you read or heard of this author before? Or what is one of your favorite historical fiction books?

[Disclosure: This self-published novel was sent to me by New Shelves Distribution for review.]

Where we would be without the dysfunctional families in Southern lit? We’d miss out on the protagonists in “The Great Santini,” “Bastard Out of Carolina,” and the stories of William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams to name just a few. Mary Morony’s debut “Apron Strings” is another in that grand tradition of Southern families run amok. As Kirkus Reviews writes “Apron Strings” is about “a white Virginia family in the late 1950s that struggles to stay together while enduring a failing marriage and racist neighbors.” The parents employ a black maid, Ethel, who cares for the four Mackey children, ages 14, 9, 7, and 4 as the book begins. It’s the third child, Sallee, 7, who narrates most of the book, chronicling two years of a home life that’s not exactly 1950s Happy Days.

The problem is the mother is harsh and often neglectful, and the father is mostly away at work. The kids, especially Sallee, must rely on Ethel for everything — meals, dressing, supervision, love — you name it. Ever-curious Sallee pesters Ethel with questions about her mother’s life and her life when they first met years ago. Ethel though has her own problems and secrets, which become more clear in the intermingled chapters that she narrates. You get her much-sought perspective though her dialect isn’t always easy to understand.

It’s a 1950s household that is stifling and toxic — amid a town where schools, restaurants, and theaters are racially segregated, and overt racism and violence exist. Author Mary Morony vividly permeates the story with the atmosphere of the times, pinpointing everything from the culture and uptight manners to the pervasive cigarette smoking and the endless high ball drinks and alcoholism. Apparently Morony’s story comes from her own childhood in which she was born and raised in Charlottesville, Va., by her family’s black maid, who she says: “taught me love and acceptance with warm, loving humor and unending patience.”

I found “Apron Strings” an easy book to fall into. The young Sallee is an endearing narrator and the dialogue sounds just right. Sallee’s often trying to keep up with her brother Gordy and learns the hard way after a couple incidents to stay clear of the neighbors house. (I couldn’t help but be a bit reminded of Scout and Jem and Boo Radley’s dilapidated place in “To Kill a Mockingbird.”) But I eagerly followed along to find out what would happen to the Mackey family — if they would split apart and disintegrate or how it would conclude. Divorce back then was a terrible taboo, and what the kids go through pulls them in various directions. It’s not an action-packed book so to speak, the kids often sit around the house on pins and needles, with a mother that’s unavailable or cannot be disturbed and a black maid that’s busy working. At times the ebbs and pulls are more psychological and heart-tugging in nature — as most good dysfunctional family stories are.

For readers looking for a big story arc and climax with tied-up resolutions at the end, “Apron Strings” might be a bit disappointing, just judging by some of the comments on Goodreads. The novel reads at times like it’s chronicling a slice of the kids’ lives when times were very tough during their childhood. By the end, there’s loose ends that remain a bit loose and not all is resolved — there’s not a showdown between the mother and kids, or between the past and present, or any justice against the racist neighbors. It’s a subtle ending, and one that harkens back to the maid’s presence in their lives to pull them through. For me, the vivid atmosphere and Sallee’s narration resound powerfully at times, making it a moving novel through harsh times in the South of the late 1950s. I liked the book and the childhood journey it takes through its minefield of familial and societal mores.

How about you — have you read or heard of this novel, or what is your favorite book about a dysfunctional family?