Tonight is the first event for the new book, and I've spent most of the afternoon at home with curlers in my hair and cucumber circles on the eyes...
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Atwood's prose in this writer's writer book is easy, that is to say, friendly. Cozy, even. But to breeze over the chapters, culled from a series of lectures Atwood gave at Cambridge, is to miss some delicious morsels that taste as universal and esoteric at the same moment as Atwood's fiction does.
An intriguing catalog in the introduction tells us that writers -- ones we would know, it is hinted -- say that they write "... To set down the past before it is forgotten. To excavate the past *because* it has been forgotten ... To thumb my nose at death ... To attract the love of a beautiful woman ..." and so on, for two and a half pages.
Do two souls inhabit the writer? Are we jekyll and hyde? Which is the "real" writer? How have we reacted over centuries, millennia, to censorship, and where does that response land us? Are we some alien creatures, or is that impression, well, impressed upon us from without? What to do with all those ideas? What to do with all those questions about our ideas?
Atwood brings her own history to the making of this book: A Canadian writer starting out when no Canadian writers existed in the main to show the way, riding the eventual tide and being uniquely Atwood. Stunning theoretical stuff, if you can imagine such a thing (remember this is "friendly" language), purposeful biographical points tucked into the warp and weft of the whole, in all, a fine read with the potential to ignite any mind already simmering.
Beautiful, mysterious tensions and collisions between earth and sea, God and the gods, innocence and knowledge, good and something other than good abound in this novel of a young Chicano in New Mexico in the days during and just after World War II. An incredibly-realized first novel, now nearly 50 years old, by the author some consider the Father of Chicano Literature. The point of view is that of a seven year-old boy entering school and the larger community from his family's life on the plains, as an old woman known to make cures in the old ways comes to live with his family and teaches him what she knows. It's a rough couple of years that passes, with the protagonist seeing more death and ugliness than perhaps a young boy ought to witness first-hand. Antonio tries to grapple with these events through the strong Catholic religion he's growing into, yet also through the paganistic sensibilities of some of his young cohorts, and eventually through the all-knowing eyes of La Curandera herself, as he comes to understand that all things are not knowable, at least not all by way of the same cosmic answers. Opened a world completely unknown to me, and yet is entirely accessible, sympathetic, relevant. If not for some very slight ragged edges, this would rate a 5 for me.
In a time when it seems all the rage to create scarcely-sympathetic characters, the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series is like breathing clean air. Plot seems to hardly matter in the series, though without one we would not be the fortunate recipients of Precious Ramotswe's gentle and traditional wisdom. In Tears of the Giraffe Mma Ramotswe solves, among others, the mystery of what happened to a young American who disappeared in Botswana years ago, and as always, the gracious repercussions of her work touch and unite numerous people. Mma Ramotswe's household increases by two, a surprise to her: one of the two is not Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni, to whom she is engaged to be married.
There is suspense and the habitation of a country and culture far away, there are lessons of morality that are not moralistic, there are deeply three-dimensional characters living in these pages, and humor and surprise and relief. An excellent read.
This is a story that invites, not demands, the reader's slow, thoughtful chewing. In that respect, such a novel has not appeared in years. Perhaps not since Robinson's previous, Housekeeping. If you're fairly young, you can't imagine what you'd have in common in a dying Congregationalist preacher in the mid-1950s. If you're not Christian, even more problematic, as the Rev. Ames peppers this long, dying letter to his son, still at a tender age at the writing, with Scripture.
There is Robinson's gift, for this book is about all us all, after all.
Much narrative, little dialogue, you flip through it and wonder how to survive it. But soon you're going back and re-reading passages you've just read, not because they've confounded you, but because of the shock or universal truth and the beauty in their conveyance.
There is not a literary convention that Robinson does not employ with elan. You want to shake Ames from his apparent naivete, only to come to understand, later, that he wasn't naive at all.
He lives in the delight of a home freshly (for a man of seventy-something) endowed with a young wife and a very young son. Now the doctor tells him he isn't long for the world. The conceit is that Ames will herein write to his adult son (for that's when the letter is intended for opening) the many things he feels that he, as father, should teach a son and tell him about his family history -- which includes forays by a grandfather with the raiding John Brown in Kansas -- but ought not tell so young a boy.
The result is an intricate embroidering of an Iowa town (Gilead) that's been fraught with as much devastation and plain hard living and some better times and some strange and beautiful souls as any we've ever met anywhere in literature.
The story arc sneaks up on you. By then you're invested in Ames and his young family. Ames, his best friend (also a minister), his namesake (the other minister's son), have some coming-to-terms to do, with themselves and with each other. And as it will do, life's circle goes on, dips, rises, ends, starts anew, and with Gilead, we also find ourselves renewed.
The kind of rare, lovely artifact that changes us.
Everything about these novels sings with a lightness and yet a depth that is irresistible. No one can read one of these books and not set it down occasionally to contemplate the deceptively simple, yet profound, truths about living together on this earth, and how to do it well, revealed in Precious Ramotswe's investigations and observations, or to simply have a chuckle about the strange circumstances and new points of view (to our American ears) of those who populate these books.
In this installment of the series, now-assistant-detective Mma Makutsi strikes out on her own to found a typing school for a special subset -- men -- who would never think to show up at the secretarial school, which is, after all, for women. But clever Mma Makutsi recognizes that in this age of computers, even a man must learn to type, even if he must do it clandestinely.
Lucky for us, the wily assistant does not leave the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency and Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors, but starts the school on her free evenings. The venture brings her a suitor but, as so often in McCall Smith's Botswana (and everywhere), things are not as they appear.
Meanwhile, in her usual wise and gentle manner, Mma Precious Ramotswe continues to solve peoples' problems, care for the two foster children she has been persuaded to take into her home on Zebra Drive, and drink bush tea, wondering when Mr JLB Matekoni might set a date for their wedding. Rra Matekoni, for his part, at long last stands up to the venerable matron of the orphanage who has so handily persuaded him to take in those two orphan children, telling her that the water pump at the orphanage is finally, irrevocably, beyond repair, even HIS capable repair. And wonder of wonders, she has acceded to finding the resources for a new one.
The mysteries resolved and problems solved by Mma Ramotswe are really just ways into a preachless and tender morality and a means to illustrate just how much each of us has, how many resources reside within and around us every moment of our being. In fact I have returned to this series after a month of very difficult news and knowing that hard times are ahead for myself and my family, and it has inspired and emboldened me, and kept my spirits high and right. I don't know if this is literary fluff or not, but does it matter?
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Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing by Margaret Atwood
dwrites, September 19, 2011
Atwood's prose in this writer's writer book is easy, that is to say, friendly. Cozy, even. But to breeze over the chapters, culled from a series of lectures Atwood gave at Cambridge, is to miss some delicious morsels that taste as universal and esoteric at the same moment as Atwood's fiction does.An intriguing catalog in the introduction tells us that writers -- ones we would know, it is hinted -- say that they write "... To set down the past before it is forgotten. To excavate the past *because* it has been forgotten ... To thumb my nose at death ... To attract the love of a beautiful woman ..." and so on, for two and a half pages.
Do two souls inhabit the writer? Are we jekyll and hyde? Which is the "real" writer? How have we reacted over centuries, millennia, to censorship, and where does that response land us? Are we some alien creatures, or is that impression, well, impressed upon us from without? What to do with all those ideas? What to do with all those questions about our ideas?
Atwood brings her own history to the making of this book: A Canadian writer starting out when no Canadian writers existed in the main to show the way, riding the eventual tide and being uniquely Atwood. Stunning theoretical stuff, if you can imagine such a thing (remember this is "friendly" language), purposeful biographical points tucked into the warp and weft of the whole, in all, a fine read with the potential to ignite any mind already simmering.
Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya
dwrites, September 1, 2011
Beautiful, mysterious tensions and collisions between earth and sea, God and the gods, innocence and knowledge, good and something other than good abound in this novel of a young Chicano in New Mexico in the days during and just after World War II. An incredibly-realized first novel, now nearly 50 years old, by the author some consider the Father of Chicano Literature. The point of view is that of a seven year-old boy entering school and the larger community from his family's life on the plains, as an old woman known to make cures in the old ways comes to live with his family and teaches him what she knows. It's a rough couple of years that passes, with the protagonist seeing more death and ugliness than perhaps a young boy ought to witness first-hand. Antonio tries to grapple with these events through the strong Catholic religion he's growing into, yet also through the paganistic sensibilities of some of his young cohorts, and eventually through the all-knowing eyes of La Curandera herself, as he comes to understand that all things are not knowable, at least not all by way of the same cosmic answers. Opened a world completely unknown to me, and yet is entirely accessible, sympathetic, relevant. If not for some very slight ragged edges, this would rate a 5 for me.Tears of the Giraffe by A. Smith
dwrites, August 14, 2011
In a time when it seems all the rage to create scarcely-sympathetic characters, the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series is like breathing clean air. Plot seems to hardly matter in the series, though without one we would not be the fortunate recipients of Precious Ramotswe's gentle and traditional wisdom. In Tears of the Giraffe Mma Ramotswe solves, among others, the mystery of what happened to a young American who disappeared in Botswana years ago, and as always, the gracious repercussions of her work touch and unite numerous people. Mma Ramotswe's household increases by two, a surprise to her: one of the two is not Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni, to whom she is engaged to be married.There is suspense and the habitation of a country and culture far away, there are lessons of morality that are not moralistic, there are deeply three-dimensional characters living in these pages, and humor and surprise and relief. An excellent read.
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
dwrites, August 4, 2011
This is a story that invites, not demands, the reader's slow, thoughtful chewing. In that respect, such a novel has not appeared in years. Perhaps not since Robinson's previous, Housekeeping. If you're fairly young, you can't imagine what you'd have in common in a dying Congregationalist preacher in the mid-1950s. If you're not Christian, even more problematic, as the Rev. Ames peppers this long, dying letter to his son, still at a tender age at the writing, with Scripture.There is Robinson's gift, for this book is about all us all, after all.
Much narrative, little dialogue, you flip through it and wonder how to survive it. But soon you're going back and re-reading passages you've just read, not because they've confounded you, but because of the shock or universal truth and the beauty in their conveyance.
There is not a literary convention that Robinson does not employ with elan. You want to shake Ames from his apparent naivete, only to come to understand, later, that he wasn't naive at all.
He lives in the delight of a home freshly (for a man of seventy-something) endowed with a young wife and a very young son. Now the doctor tells him he isn't long for the world. The conceit is that Ames will herein write to his adult son (for that's when the letter is intended for opening) the many things he feels that he, as father, should teach a son and tell him about his family history -- which includes forays by a grandfather with the raiding John Brown in Kansas -- but ought not tell so young a boy.
The result is an intricate embroidering of an Iowa town (Gilead) that's been fraught with as much devastation and plain hard living and some better times and some strange and beautiful souls as any we've ever met anywhere in literature.
The story arc sneaks up on you. By then you're invested in Ames and his young family. Ames, his best friend (also a minister), his namesake (the other minister's son), have some coming-to-terms to do, with themselves and with each other. And as it will do, life's circle goes on, dips, rises, ends, starts anew, and with Gilead, we also find ourselves renewed.
The kind of rare, lovely artifact that changes us.
The Kalahari Typing School for Men: More from the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith
dwrites, June 8, 2011
Everything about these novels sings with a lightness and yet a depth that is irresistible. No one can read one of these books and not set it down occasionally to contemplate the deceptively simple, yet profound, truths about living together on this earth, and how to do it well, revealed in Precious Ramotswe's investigations and observations, or to simply have a chuckle about the strange circumstances and new points of view (to our American ears) of those who populate these books.In this installment of the series, now-assistant-detective Mma Makutsi strikes out on her own to found a typing school for a special subset -- men -- who would never think to show up at the secretarial school, which is, after all, for women. But clever Mma Makutsi recognizes that in this age of computers, even a man must learn to type, even if he must do it clandestinely.
Lucky for us, the wily assistant does not leave the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency and Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors, but starts the school on her free evenings. The venture brings her a suitor but, as so often in McCall Smith's Botswana (and everywhere), things are not as they appear.
Meanwhile, in her usual wise and gentle manner, Mma Precious Ramotswe continues to solve peoples' problems, care for the two foster children she has been persuaded to take into her home on Zebra Drive, and drink bush tea, wondering when Mr JLB Matekoni might set a date for their wedding. Rra Matekoni, for his part, at long last stands up to the venerable matron of the orphanage who has so handily persuaded him to take in those two orphan children, telling her that the water pump at the orphanage is finally, irrevocably, beyond repair, even HIS capable repair. And wonder of wonders, she has acceded to finding the resources for a new one.
The mysteries resolved and problems solved by Mma Ramotswe are really just ways into a preachless and tender morality and a means to illustrate just how much each of us has, how many resources reside within and around us every moment of our being. In fact I have returned to this series after a month of very difficult news and knowing that hard times are ahead for myself and my family, and it has inspired and emboldened me, and kept my spirits high and right. I don't know if this is literary fluff or not, but does it matter?
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