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June 26, 2006
Books I Read This June
Total Book Count: 86
Never Let Me Go
by Kazuo Ishiguro
Entertainment Weekly: “Superbly unsettling, impeccably controlled . . . . The book’s irresistible power comes from Ishiguro’s matchless ability to expose its dark heart in careful increments.”
My Review: I had enjoyed Ishiguro's work before--most notably his famous "The Remains of the Day", but I believe this is his best novel to date. I was immediately caught up in the intrigue of the plot, and was captivated by the way that the mysteries were never fully explained, but merely referenced in the natural course of events. It drove me crazy, made me love AND hate the characters, and made me feel like I was part of their world even after I finished the last page.
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Heaven Lake
by John Dalton
Publishers Weekly: Sober and searching yet sublimely comic, this impressive debut about a modern-day missionary in Taiwan charts a journey away from reflexive faith and toward a broader understanding of the world and its ways. Reminiscent of the work of Graham Greene and Norman Rush, but possessing a quirky innocence and gravitas all its own, the novel is crammed with heady matters, clashes of cultures, ill-considered schemes and unrequited love. Vincent Saunders, a man with strong religious beliefs, leaves his tiny Illinois hamlet to take a job as a Christian missionary in Taiwan. As the only volunteer in the mid-sized city of Toulio, he establishes and runs the ministry house, while teaching English classes to make ends meet. His Toulio acquaintances are an odd bunch: fellow boarder Alec, a foul-mouthed, hashish-smoking Scot; Shao-fei, the crippled son of Vincent's landlady; Gloria, a late-arriving volunteer with a passion for Chinese calligraphy and proselytizing. There is also Mr. Gwa, a local businessman, who offers Vincent $10,000 to go to mainland China, find the lovely young girl who has long bewitched the rich merchant, and pretend to marry her in order to bring her back. At first refusing to take the job on moral grounds, Vincent is forced to reconsider after he succumbs to the aggressive advances of Trudy, a wayward teenage girl in one of his English classes, which costs him his job and standing in the community. Rethinking Mr. Gwa's offer, he heads for China to bring back Kai-Ling, the man's bride. It is during this memorable journey to the heart of modern China that Vincent comes of age, emotionally and spiritually, enduring thieves, bizarre encounters and false promises from a reluctant bride with a lover on the side. Artfully pacing the series of revelations that rock the book on its way to a surprising conclusion, Dalton revises conventional assumptions about contemporary China and collective cultural views of love and marriage. This is a noteworthy first novel by a writer to watch.
My Review: Unlike my normal "plow through" reading method, I put down this book for weeks at a time. It wasn't that I disliked the plot, exactly. No, I just wasn't drawn in by the main character, who--for much of the 451-pages is wishy-washy and irritating. Yet somehow I identified with him, a traveler in a foreign land. There were scenes that I felt I had lived through--times when the language barrier was exhausting and yet the thought of home wasn't exactly appealing. By the end, I was--if not rooting for Vincent--at least pleasantly surprised to see how the whole thing turned out.
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The Shadow of the Wind
by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
Publishers Weekly: Ruiz Zafón's novel, a bestseller in his native Spain, takes the satanic touches from Angel Heart and stirs them into a bookish intrigue à la Foucault's Pendulum. The time is the 1950s; the place, Barcelona. Daniel Sempere, the son of a widowed bookstore owner, is 10 when he discovers a novel, The Shadow of the Wind, by Julián Carax. The novel is rare, the author obscure, and rumors tell of a horribly disfigured man who has been burning every copy he can find of Carax's novels. The man calls himself Laín Coubert-the name of the devil in one of Carax's novels. As he grows up, Daniel's fascination with the mysterious Carax links him to a blind femme fatale with a "porcelain gaze," Clara Barceló; another fan, a leftist jack-of-all-trades, Fermín Romero de Torres; his best friend's sister, the delectable Beatriz Aguilar; and, as he begins investigating the life and death of Carax, a cast of characters with secrets to hide. Officially, Carax's dead body was dumped in an alley in 1936. But discrepancies in this story surface. Meanwhile, Daniel and Fermín are being harried by a sadistic policeman, Carax's childhood friend. As Daniel's quest continues, frightening parallels between his own life and Carax's begin to emerge. Ruiz Zafón strives for a literary tone, and no scene goes by without its complement of florid, cute and inexact similes and metaphors (snow is "God's dandruff"; servants obey orders with "the efficiency and submissiveness of a body of well-trained insects"). Yet the colorful cast of characters, the gothic turns and the straining for effect only give the book the feel of para-literature or the Hollywood version of a great 19th-century novel.
My Review: How strange that upon searching Amazon for the blurb to write this review, I noticed that Amazon is offering a discount if you buy Heaven Lake with The Shadow of the Wind. I bought these two books months apart (one at Barnes and Noble and one at Politics and Prose), and only through remarkable chance did I read them in the same week. Nonetheless, between the two books, there is no contest--The Shadow of the Wind was FAR superior. I don't know what the reviewer from Publishers Weekly was thinking (bad day, perhaps?), but I thought the whole book was woven together in a masterful way. I giggled aloud, I was scared to get out of bed lest Lain Coubert (the devil) grab at my ankles, I was touched by the inevitable star-crossed lovers. This is a book that I will return to in the heart of winter, over a cup of cocoa, to savor again and again.
