Tag Archives: rating: 8/10

Book review – Rick Moody: The Diviners

01 Saturday Sep 2007

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An ambitious, sprawling novel depicting America in the uncertainty of the disputed election of 2000 through the prism of the flurry around a mini-series project that is picked up and hyped throughout the media industry.

It is the same sort of book as James Joyce’s Ulysses – with constant literary innovation and such a wide range of voices and styles. Of course, it’s not nearly as good; the only passages that approach brilliance are those where Moody returns to his forte – the suburbs and the family.

But even where it isn’t brilliant, it is always good, entertaining, engaging and insightful. It finishes with a futile flourish, as the network CEO is assured by a judge in the disputed returns that the climate is right to crush the mini-series and everything it stands for; the future is reality TV, Republican and patriotic.

Book review – Carol Shields: The Stone Diaries

01 Saturday Sep 2007

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The main character is Daisy Goodwill, and it’s not exactly a diary. But Stone refers to the surname given to all the orphans at the orphanage where Daisy’s mother Mercy was brought up and to Daisy’s father’s preoccupation with stone as a quarry worker and then a stone sculptor. Daisy is herself almost an orphan, her mother dying in childbirth; her father not seeing her again until she was eleven.

The novel tells her story from birth to death, 1905 to the 1990s. Its scope is huge; we learn the stories and fates of many of the people whose lives contribute to Daisy’s.

Most interesting to me was the life of her father-in-law, Magnus Flett, who lives to 116, the last fifty years of his life spent unknown and estranged from his family, who all think him long dead. Daisy, visiting Scotland, comes across him.

The novel embraces many genres, a tapestry of biography, monologue, newspaper articles and letters.

Book review: Strong Motion – Jonathan Franzen

23 Thursday Aug 2007

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A long scrapbook of a novel, with brilliant passages and fascinating characters let down by long passages of exposition and a plot that tries to do too much.

A seismologist, Renee, works out that the earthquakes around Boston are being caused by a huge hole drilled by Sweeting-Aldren, who are secretly pumping all their waste down it. Louis Holland pursues her, even though she’s older than him, and joins her quest to bring Sweeting-Aldren down. His detested mother has just inherited $22 million shares in the company, and he wants to teach her a lesson.

But just as important, and much more interesting, is the love sub-plot. A troubled girl from Louis’ past, Lauren, turns up and due to a moment of fatal hesitation, he loses Renee. Louis is a brilliant character. He’s like Holden Caulfield at twenty-two. He makes his mother and sister uncomfortable because he is so judgemental. If they’re phony, in his eyes, he won’t even talk to them. When a fundamentalist Christian takes over the radio-station where he works, he tells the new owner that he (Louis) is the antichrist and walks out.

Franzen has such good insights into the way family works, something he developed even further in The Corrections. If you loved The Corrections (like I did) you’ll like this novel.

Book review: The blind assassin

14 Tuesday Aug 2007

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Image of The Blind Assassin     

A long novel that borrows from the family saga genre, but recasts it in a literary form. It’s difficult to summarise, because of the intricacies of relationship that make up its substance.

Iris and Laura Chase are brought up in a privileged world, which collapses in the Great Depression. Iris, the elder sister, is married off to her father’s business rival, Richard Griffen. He takes over the Chase button factory and suddenly both girls are under his care. (And that of his evil sister, Winifred.)

The story is told by Iris as she nears death in 1999. Scenes from her present life intersperse the flashbacks to the fateful events in the 1930s and 1940s. We also read extracts of Laura Chase’s novel, The Blind Asssassin, published posthumously.  It describes an illicit affair between a wealthy woman and an itinerant fugitive. Together, they concoct a fantasy world involving the Blind Assassin.

Spoiler alert:

As we read the extracts from the Blind Assassin, we assume it’s Laura having an affair with the communist agitator she met at a picnic. But the ending reveals that Iris wrote the book as a memorial for Laura. Iris herself had an affair with him, and revealing this to Laura was enough (maybe) to drive Laura to suicide. (After Laura was repeatedly raped by Richard and had a forced abortion.)

 For me, the highlight of the novel is the enigmatic Laura. She is such a wonderful character – dreamy, otherworldly, full of an entire world no-one else enters. She is passionate about religion. She cuts the bits out of the family Bible she doesn’t like. And then there’s this story:

On bread days Reenie would give us scraps of dough for bread men, with raisins for eyes and buttons. Then she would bake them for us. I would eat mine, but Laura would save hers up. Once Reenie found a whole row of them in Laura’s top drawer, hard as rock, wrapped up in her handkerchiefs like tiny bun-faced mummies. Reenise said they would attract mice and would have to go straight into the garbage, but Laura held out for a mass burial in the kitchen garden, behind the rhubarb bush. She said there had to be prayers. If not, she would never eat her dinner any more. She was always a hard bargainer, once she got down to it.

(You can read more Blind Assassin quotes on my quotes blog: http://othervoices.wordpress.com/tag/atwood-margaret/ )

For me, the weakness of the novel is all the chopping and changing. I like a more linear narrative.
      

Carson McCullers – Clock without hands

03 Tuesday Jul 2007

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Published in 1961, this is McCullers’ final novel. She died aged 50 in 1967, leaving an unfinished autobiography.

 Clock without hands is a novel about death. It starts with Malone the chemist being told he is dying. Malone goes to visit his friend the Judge, a comic, corpulent Republican former senator in his eighties who drinks and pontificates on his own greatness, while fearing death and mourning his son, dead of suicide in his twenties. Most of the novel is concerned with the Judge, his grandson Jester and his amanuensis, Sherman the African-American with blue eyes.

 This quote sums up the Judge and McCuller’s humour:

When the odour in the bathroom rose, he was not annoyed by this; on the contrary, since he was pleased by anything that belonged to him, and his faeces were no exception, the smell rather soothed him. So he sat there, relaxed and meditative, pleased with himself. (81)

McCullers is brilliant in being both humorous and profound. The Judge is a glorious character, so hilarious in his arrogance, in his grand scheme to revalidate Confederate currency (he has millions stored in the attic).

For more quotes, visit my quotes blog – http://othervoices.wordpress.com/tag/mccullers-carson/