PowellsBooks.Blog

Aesop's Mirror: A Love Story by Maryalice Huggins

Reviewed by Benjamin Moser
Harper's Magazine

In Aesop's Mirror: A Love Story (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $26), Maryalice Huggins uses a cast-off bit of furniture to tell a surprisingly complex story of American beginnings -- surprising, because the beginning of the book makes us think we know exactly what's coming. Huggins, an antiques restorer, finds a giant mirror at an out-of-the-way estate auction in Rhode Island, a mirror that, she discovers, belonged to a branch of the state's most aristocratic family, the Browns of Providence, and that probably is itself of American origin. She starts digging around in archives, finding little...

Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro

Reviewed by Ellen Urbani
The Oregonian

The advent of a much-heralded literary comeback is upon us; week after week, in a nearly endless parade of mastery, new work is being trotted out but such luminaries as Philip Roth, A.S. Byatt, Michael Chabon, Dave Eggers, Lorrie Moore, Thomas Pynchon and even Vladimir Nabokov. Even so, Alice Munro's 13th story collection, Too Much Happiness, will surely be one of the most venerated and widely reviewed of the bunch. Debuting mere months after her virtual coronation with the Man Booker International Prize for her body of work, and sidling out from beneath the long shadow cast by her repeated threats of retirement, these 10 short stories cement the capstone on what fellow Canadian Margaret Atwood has described as Munro's ascent ...

Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life by Carol Sklenicka

Reviewed by Mark Athitakis
Minneapolis Star Tribune

Who made Raymond Carver? Maybe it was Gordon Lish, who edited Carver's short stories about workaday lives into the minimalist style that made him famous. Perhaps it was editor Gary Fisketjon, whose marketing savvy made Carver a standard-bearer of American fiction in the 1980s. Or it could have been his second wife, Tess Gallagher, who bolstered Carver's reputation in the years before his death in 1988. So many people have had a claim on Carver's good name that it's fair to wonder how much of it Carver could claim for himself. Carol Sklenicka's meticulously researched, sharply analytical biography never denies Carver his talent, but it also sheds ample light on larger literary forces that shaped his career. That makes the book something of a shadow history of American fiction writers across three decades, with Carver as a typical if troubled exemplar. The product of an Oregon working-class family, he grew up with Hemingway-level ...

The Good Soldiers by David Finkel

Reviewed by Akiva Gottlieb
The Nation

In Washington, they read. Foreign policy decisions made by men and women in suits, understandably too busy to embark on a fact-finding mission to every war zone, disaster area or human rights debacle, often depend on the labor of reporters (who report) and experts (who filter raw eyewitness accounts into something historically and politically resonant, primed for the partisan echo chambers). In October, in the thick of the Beltway debate over the best course of action in Afghanistan, the Wall Street Journal observed that White House and Pentagon policy-makers were studying two histories that draw divergent lessons from the Vietnam War. (The article did not challenge the plausibility of the Afghanistan-Vietnam analogy itself.) One, Lessons in Disaster by Gordon M. Goldstein, warns about the dangers of accepting military advice as gospel; the other cautions against bowing to popular dissent and discontent when a counterinsurgency fight is still winnable. According to the Journal, the latter book, A Better War, by former Army lieutenant colonel and CIA official ...

Far Arden by Kevin Cannon

Reviewed by John Eisler
Rain Taxi

An adventure story a la Tintin meets 21st-century indie comics in Kevin Cannon's debut graphic novel, Far Arden. The book details the quest of an arctic sailor named Army Shanks who, as he tells his young orphan friend at the end of Chapter I, is "going to avenge your father's death, find the Areopagitica, save Hafley, possibly rekindle a rocky love affair with Fortuna (but probably not)... and fulfill my promise to find Far Arden and meet up with my friend and mentor, Simon Arctavius." With a ship named after Milton's famed anti-censorship essay, another named the Melville, and through-lines about global warming and DNA that keep popping up, the book offers more to chew on than just an Indiana Jones exploit set on arctic waters. And while the story is occasionally bumpy, especially at the beginning, even the plot contrivances seem enjoyed by the novel's dramatis personae, as if they know they're in a farce; if the characters occasionally speak in exposition, their journey to the fabled Far Arden nonetheless becomes moving by ...

My Prison, My Home: One Woman's Story of Captivity in Iran by Haleh Esfandiari

Reviewed by Nikki Keddie
Ms. Magazine

Esfandiari's profoundly moving memoir goes beyond the limited story suggested in its subtitle to interweave a vivid autobiography and a brief history of Iran before and after the 1978-79 revolution. Potential readers should not be put off by fear of a depressing tale of horror; this is, above all, a story of faith -- in the human capacity to withstand mistreatment and in what people working together against tyranny can accomplish.

Born to a prominent Iranian agronomist and his Austrian wife, Esfandiari grew up in relative privilege. She attended college in Vienna and took a job at a liberal Tehran newspaper. But when the Shah imposed a new editor, she left her position as a reporter to work for the Women's Organization of Iran. During the revolution that tore the country apart, her family fled Iran, and she eventually became director of the Middle East program at Washington, D.C.'s Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, where she convened discussions on Iran and ...

The Humbling by Philip Roth

Reviewed by Rhian Ellis
Identity Theory

There are a handful of writers I read not because of the stories they tell, or for their memorable characters, or for their ability to evoke a time or place, but because I really enjoy being inside their heads. Alice Munro is one of these writers--her characters are vividly real but not especially distinctive, and if you read a lot of her work, they all blur together. Things happen in her stories, but the plots feel secondary to how the narrator interprets them. And to be honest, if I had to choose a time and place to read about, rural 20th century Canada would not spring to mind. But I find Munro's work--almost every word of it--utterly compelling. It's because her stories are about what it's like to be in a particular mind, to have a particular consciousness. Her noticing, her interpreting, is always new and shocking and revelatory, and right and true.

Philip Roth is another of these writers. I have no special interest in the urban, post-war, sex-obsessed white male (most of Roth's ...

Amigoland by Oscar Casares

Reviewed by Benjamin Moser
Harper's Magazine

A brambly Latin-American patriarch is the hero of Oscar Casares's Amigoland (Little, Brown $23.99). The ninety-one-year-old Don Fidencio is holed up, miserably, in a nursing home of the book's name in a Texas border town, furiously protesting his confinement -- "He had more trouble with just the idea of being here with these old men and women. He knew he wasn't old like some of them" -- though Casares shows, of course, Don Fidencio needs to be where he is, chronicling in excruciating detail the humiliations that await those who outlive their time. Don Fidencio is not a very pleasant person, and it is only thanks to his younger brother Celestino's new girlfriend, Socorro, a house cleaner who lives on the other side of the river, that the two old men rekindle something like a relationship, though it never quite becomes warm as they grumble, mumble, and talk past each other, to often brilliant effect:

"You want her to wash your socks?" Don Fidencio said.

"I was only trying to be pleasant."

Don Fidencio

...

Gringa: A Contradictory Girlhood by Melissa Hart

Reviewed by Katie Schneider
The Oregonian

"What's best for the child." The phrase gets bandied about a lot in divorce proceedings. For a young Melissa Hart, it was a judge's justification for taking her away from her mother, a loving, vibrant woman who happened to be a lesbian. "I must consider what's best for the children," the judge said. "A woman living with another woman, on a dangerous street with volatile neighbors?" The contrast between her father's sterile suburban lifestyle and her mother's warmth is at the center of Hart's new memoir, Gringa: A Contradictory Girlhood. "There were no Latinos, Chicanos or Hispanics in our upper-class gated community. There were only people like us," Hart writes of her early childhood in the early 1970s in suburban Los Angeles. "My mother and I pretended allegiance to their Tupperware parties, to their Brownie troops, to their Sunday morning services at the Presbyterian Church." But Hart's mother, Margaret, wasn't like the other suburban housewives. She wanted an altogether different life. First came ...

The Original of Laura by Vladimir Nabokov

Reviewed by Heller McAlpin
The Christian Science Monitor

When Vladimir Nabokov died in Switzerland in 1977, he left explicit instructions for his heirs to destroy the penciled index cards that made up his work to date on his unfinished 18th novel, The Original of Laura (Dying is Fun). Vera, his loyal wife and amanuensis, who died in 1991, couldn't bring herself to do it. And, fortunately, after much debate, neither could their son, Dmitri. Of course, it's one thing not to burn the partial draft, and another to publish it. But, although Nabokov may be squirming in his grave, Nabokov fans and scholars have reason to thank Dmitri for his brave parental defiance in publishing this invaluable glimpse into the way his brilliant father worked. All too often, publications of half-cooked literary fragments are not just disappointing in literary terms, but seem motivated as much by greed as by the heirs' desire to keep their famous forebear alive in print. But whatever one thinks of Nabokov's emphatically unfinished ...