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January 02, 2006
Books I Read in November - December 2005
72 Hour Hold
by Bebe Moore Campbell
Publishers Weekly: Starred Review. This powerful story of a mother trying to cope with her daughter's bipolar disorder reads at times like a heightened procedural. Keri, the owner of an upscale L.A. resale clothing shop, is hopeful as daughter Trina celebrates her 18th birthday and begins a successful-seeming new treatment. But as Trina relapses into mania, both their worlds spiral out of control. An ex-husband who refuses to believe their daughter is really sick, the stigmas of mental illness in the black community, a byzantine medico-insurance system—all make Keri increasingly desperate as Trina deteriorates (requiring, repeatedly, a "72 hour hold" in the hospital against her will). The ins and outs of working the mental health system take up a lot of space, but Moore Campbell is terrific at describing the different emotional gradations produced by each new circle of hell. There's a lesbian subplot, and a radical (and expensive) group that offers treatment off the grid may hold promise. The author of a well-reviewed children's book on how to cope with a parent's mental illness, Moore Campbell (What You Owe Me) is on familiar ground; she gives Keri's actions and decisions compelling depth and detail, and makes Trina's illness palpable. While this feels at times like a mission-driven book, it draws on all of Moore Campbell's nuance and style.
My Review: This was my December book club selection, and I read it in a single 5-hour sitting during the Great Sinus Headache of 2005. While the prose was different than most of our other selections (because the author and main characters are black?), I loved the rhythm of the book. I found the journey-to-the-woods diversion to be a little weird, but I enjoyed how the plot resolved itself in a happy-but-not-perfect sort of way. Highly recommended.
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Serpent on the Crown
by Elizabeth Peters
Publishers Weekly: Starred Review. MWA Grand Master Peters delivers another winner that you can't put down and yet don't want to see end, the 17th entry in her bestselling series to feature Egyptologist Amelia Peabody Emerson and her extended family (after 2004's Guardian of the Horizon). Early in 1922, novelist Magda Petherick, the widow of noted collector Pringle Petherick, interrupts the tea that the Emerson clan are enjoying on the veranda of their house by the Nile. Mrs. Petherick wants Emerson, Amelia's eminent archeologist husband, to dispose of a beautiful golden statuette that Pringle acquired shortly before his death because she believes it carries a curse. All are intrigued. News travels fast, and such a magnificent artifact soon attracts all manner of collectors, museum authorities, journalists and evildoers. Emerson's illegitimate half-brother, Sethos, formerly a dealer in illegal antiquities, arrives in disguise, but unfortunately he's followed by the gentleman he's impersonating. Tomb excavations, mountain treks, brutal attacks, an abduction, an exorcism and murder keep the plot hopping. The author's droll sense of humor and picture of a leisurely and less complicated age add to the appeal.
My Review: Has my love affair with Amelia Peabody And Family ended? Somehow, this installment seemed a little forced. As one Amazon reviewer pointed out, the characters seem to have run the gamut and now need to be left in peace. Nonetheless, I'll give the next book (to be released in March 2006) a try.
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Collapse: How Societies Choose To Fail or Succeed
by Jared Diamond
Publishers Weekly: Starred Review. In his Pulitzer Prize–winning bestseller Guns, Germs, and Steel, geographer Diamond laid out a grand view of the organic roots of human civilizations in flora, fauna, climate and geology. That vision takes on apocalyptic overtones in this fascinating comparative study of societies that have, sometimes fatally, undermined their own ecological foundations. Diamond examines storied examples of human economic and social collapse, and even extinction, including Easter Island, classical Mayan civilization and the Greenland Norse. He explores patterns of population growth, overfarming, overgrazing and overhunting, often abetted by drought, cold, rigid social mores and warfare, that lead inexorably to vicious circles of deforestation, erosion and starvation prompted by the disappearance of plant and animal food sources. Extending his treatment to contemporary environmental trouble spots, from Montana to China to Australia, he finds today's global, technologically advanced civilization very far from solving the problems that plagued primitive, isolated communities in the remote past. At times Diamond comes close to a counsel of despair when contemplating the environmental havoc engulfing our rapidly industrializing planet, but he holds out hope at examples of sustainability from highland New Guinea's age-old but highly diverse and efficient agriculture to Japan's rigorous program of forest protection and, less convincingly, in recent green consumerism initiatives. Diamond is a brilliant expositor of everything from anthropology to zoology, providing a lucid background of scientific lore to support a stimulating, incisive historical account of these many declines and falls. Readers will find his book an enthralling, and disturbing, reminder of the indissoluble links that bind humans to nature.
My Review: When I could stay awake, I found this book to be thoughtful, exacting, and redundant. Obviously, Mr. Diamond has done his homework (or had a bevy of grad students doing the research for him), but it made for very dry reading. I ended up doing a LOT of skimming, but ultimately agreed with his conclusions.
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GraceLand
by Chris Abani
Publishers Weekly: Abani's debut novel offers a searing chronicle of a young man's coming of age in Nigeria during the late 1970s and early 1980s. The vulnerable, wide-eyed protagonist is Elvis Oke, a young Nigerian with a penchant for dancing and impersonating the American rock-and-roll singer he is named after. The story alternates between Elvis's early years in the 1970s, when his mother dies of cancer and leaves him with a disapproving father, and his life as a teenager in the Lago ghetto, a place one character calls "a pus-ridden eyesore on de face of de nation's capital." Relating how an innocent child grows into a hardened young man, the novel also gives a glimpse into a world foreign to most readers-a brutal Third World country permeated by the excesses and wonders of American popular culture. Sprinkled throughout the book are recipes and entries from Elvis's mother's journal, as well as descriptions of the kola nut ceremony through which an Igbo boy becomes a man. These sections at first seem showy and tacked on, but by the end of the book their significance becomes clearer. The book is most powerful when it refrains from polemic and didacticism and simply follows its protagonist on his daily journey through the violent, harsh Nigerian landscape. Elvis must also negotiate troubles closer to home, including a drunk and ruined father and friends who cannot always be trusted. In this book, names are destiny, "selected with care by your family and given to you as a talisman." One of Elvis's friends is named Redemption, but in the end it is Elvis who claims this moniker, both literally and symbolically.
My Review: I can't remember why I chose this audiobook, but its been an intriguing glimpse of life in Nigeria. As I listened to the lilting accent of the narrator, I kept thinking back to the two Nigerian students I knew in Sweden, and wondering if their lives bore any resemblance to the ghetto living in Lagos described in the novel. The novel was powerful, on multiple levels--highly recommended.
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Gilgamesh
by Joan London
Book Description: Gilgamesh is a rich, spare, and evocative novel of encounters and escapes, of friendship and love, of loss and acceptance, a debut that marks the emergence of a world-class talent. It is 1937, and the modern world is waiting to erupt. On a farm in rural Australia, seventeen-year-old Edith lives with her mother and her sister, Frances. One afternoon two men, her English cousin Leopold and his Armenian friend Aram, arrive-taking the long way home from an archaeological dig in Iraq-to captivate Edith with tales of a world far beyond the narrow horizon of her small town of Nunderup. One such story is the epic of Gilgamesh, the ancient Mesopotamian king who traveled the world in search of eternal life. Two years later, in 1939, Edith and her young son, Jim, set off on their own journey, to Soviet Armenia, where they are trapped by the outbreak of war. Rich, spare, and evocative, Gilgamesh won The Age Book of the Year Award for Fiction and was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award.
My Review: Again, I have no recollection of why I choose this audiobook. When I started listening to it, I had no idea of what the main plot was about--I didn't know it was Australian, set between the World Wars, or about traveling the world in search of an ideal. It was a strange, haunting book, but the narration kept the story together. Recommended for a dreary winter day, when far-off places have special appeal.
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Memories of My Melancholy Whores
by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Publishers Weekly: García Márquez's slim, reflective contribution to the romance of the brothel, his first book-length fiction in a decade, is narrated by perhaps the greatest connoisseur ever of girls for hire. After a lifetime spent in the arms of prostitutes (514 when he loses count at age 50), the unnamed journalist protagonist decides that his gift to himself on his 90th birthday will be a night with an adolescent virgin. But age, followed by the unexpected blossoming of love, disrupts his plans, and he finds himself wooing the allotted 14-year-old in silence for a year, sitting beside her as she sleeps and contemplating a life idly spent. Flashes of García Márquez's brilliant imagery—the sleeping girl is "drenched in phosphorescent perspiration"—illuminate the novella, and there are striking insights into the euphoria that is the flip side of the fear of death. The narrator's wit and charm, however, are not enough to counterbalance the monotony of his aimlessness. Though enough grace notes are struck to produce echoes of eloquence, this flatness keeps the memories as melancholy as the women themselves.
My Review: Whew--Publishers Weekly gave this book a rather harsh review, I think. Garcia Marquez is one of my all-time favorite authors, and I have loved both his fiction and non-fiction. In my opinion, one of the best aspects of his writing is how it has evolved over time. While his earlier novels had innovative prose (I still remember my frustration with Autumn of the Patriarch), his introduction of magical realism, dosed with his journalism expertise, makes a unique reading experience. This novella, while admittedly sparse, does a remarkably job of mixing Garcia Marquez's standard South American ambiance with an almost Satre-like existentialism. Publishers Weekly is just flat wrong on this one...
